Assessing yield gap in high productive countries by designing wheat ideotypes

Nimai Senapati,Mikhail A Semenov

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-40981-0

Abstract

Designing crop ideotypes in silico is a powerful tool to explore the crop yield potential and yield gap. We defined yield gap as the difference between yield potential of a crop ideotype optimized under local environment and yield of an existing cultivar under optimal management. Wheat ideotypes were designed for the current climate using the Sirius model for both water-limited and irrigated conditions in two high wheat-productive countries viz. the United Kingdom (UK) and New Zealand (NZ) with the objective of estimating yield gap. The mean ideotype yields of 15.0–19.0 t ha−1 were achieved in water-limited conditions in the UK and NZ, whereas 15.6–19.5 t ha−1 under irrigated conditions. Substantial yield gaps were found in both water-limited, 28–31% (4–6 t ha−1), and irrigated conditions, 30–32% (5–6 t ha−1) in the UK and NZ. Both yield potential (25–27%) and yield gap (32–38%) were greater in NZ than the UK. Ideotype design is generic and could apply globally for estimating yield gap. Despite wheat breeding efforts, the considerable yield gap still potentially exists in high productive countries such as the UK and NZ. To accelerate breeding, wheat ideotypes can provide the key traits for wheat improvement and closing the yield gap.

Highlights

To ensure food security for the world’s rapidly growing population, food production needs to increase substantially[1,2]
Achieving yield potential requires near perfect management of crop and soil factors along with coincidence of optimal climatic conditions that influence plant growth and development throughout the crop growth cycle[11,14]
Ideotype design together with the existence of a diverse natural genetic variations for cereal crops, for example for wheat, and recent advances in genomics and breeding technologies have high potentials for breeding of crop ideotypes by tapping the existing natural genetic variations to take the maximum advantages of local environments[3,6,20,31]

Summary

Introduction

To ensure food security for the world’s rapidly growing population, food production needs to increase substantially[1,2]. Potential yield under irrigated condition is the yield of a crop cultivar when grown under optimal management practices with water and nutrients non-limiting and biotic stresses (disease, pest, weed etc.) effectively controlled[8,9,10,11]. Www.nature.com/scientificreports latitude, actual farmer yields are generally high and yield gaps are small mainly due to the favourable climatic conditions and availability of resources and advance technologies for optimal crop managements, for example, New Zealand (NZ) and north-western Europe including the United Kingdom (UK)[15,17,18]. Designing crop ideotypes and optimization of cultivar traits under target environments have gradually become a reality with the substantial increase in computational power of modern computers and the significant advances in process-based eco-physiological crop models[24,25,27,28]. A yield gap, as assessed by designing ideotype, is exploitable and the gap could be narrowed down by crop improvement and genetic adaptation[3,6,7,18,32]

Objectives

Methods

Results