Effects of Drought-Flood Abrupt Alternation on the Growth of Summer Maize

Wuxia Bi,Denghua Yan,Yuheng Yang,Mengke Wang,Baisha Weng,Jinjie Wang

doi:10.3390/atmos11010021

Abstract

Climate change, especially precipitation change, will significantly change soil moisture, which then influences root growth, further affecting yield and grain quality. Previous studies focused on the drought or flood effects on summer maize growth. However, few studied the effects of drought-flood abrupt alternation (DFAA) on the growth of summer maize. We explored the DFAA impacts on the roots, leaf area index (LAI), yield, and grain quality in field. The main results show that DFAA had different impacts on the summer maize growth in the seeding-jointing stage (SJS) and tasseling-grain filling stage (TGS). In general, the DFAA reduced the yield. Roots at the depth of 40 cm had obviously positive impacts on the yield. The DFAA reduced the LAI and promoted the maximum LAI achieving in advance. The grain crude protein augmented under DFAA. The drought had evidently negative impacts on the grain crude fat in the TGS, while it had no obvious influence in the SJS. DFAA had no apparent impact on the grain crude starch. These results could provide some references for the effects and adaptation-strategies study of extreme climate events and their impacts on growth of summer maize.

Highlights

Global climate change has caused more prominent extreme hydrological events such as drought and flood [1,2,3]
The drought-flood abrupt alternation (DFAA) reduced the leaf area index (LAI) and promoted the maximum LAI achieving in advance
In the light DFAA treatments (DFAA1 and DFAA3), the soil moisture content had a smooth decrease after the one-day increase (Figure 2a,c)

Summary

Introduction

Global climate change has caused more prominent extreme hydrological events such as drought and flood [1,2,3]. A new type of extreme event named drought-flood abrupt alternation (DFAA). DFAA is different from the dry-wet cycling and drying-rewetting as it demands specific drought and flood conditions. The growth of maize is limited by several environmental factors, such as precipitation, temperature, light, pests, and so on [9,10,11]. Extreme climate events such as drought and flood have severe impacts on the growth of maize due to the changes in the availability of water [12,13]. It is sensitive to environmental changes and directly affects yield and grain quality

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion