Abstract
Climate change has and will continue to exert significant effects on social economy, natural environment, and human life. Research on the climatic suitability of crops is critical for mitigating and adapting to the negative impacts of climate change on crop production. In the study, we developed the climate suitability model of maize and investigated the climate suitability of summer maize during the base period (1981–2010) and two future periods of 2031–2060 (2040s) and 2071–2100 (2080s) in the North China Plain (NCP) based on BCC-CSM2-MR model (BCC) from the Coupled Model Comparison Program (CMIP6) under two Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) 245 and SSP585. The phenological shift of maize under future climate scenarios was simulated by the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator (APSIM). The results showed that the root mean square errors (RMSE) between observations and projections for sunshine suitability (SS), temperature suitability (ST), precipitation suitability (SP), and integrated climate suitability (SZ) during the whole growth period were 0.069, 0.072, 0.057, and 0.040, respectively. Overall, the BCC projections for climate suitability were in suitable consistency with the observations in the NCP. During 1981–2010, the SP, ST, and SZ were high in the north of the NCP and low in the south. The SP, ST, and SZ showed a downward trend under all the future climate scenarios in most areas of NCP while the SS increased. Therein, the change range of SP and SS was 0–0.1 under all the future climate scenarios. The ST declined by 0.1–0.2 in the future except for the decrease of more than 0.3 under the SSP585 scenario in the 2080s. The decrease in SZ in the 2040s and 2080s under both SSP scenarios varied from 0 to 0.2. Moreover, the optimum area decreases greatly under future scenarios while the suitable area increases significantly. Adjusting sowing data (SD) would have essential impacts on climate suitability. To some extent, delaying SD was beneficial to improve the climate suitability of summer maize in the NCP, especially under the SSP585 scenario in the 2080s. Our findings can not only provide data support for summer maize production to adapt to climate change but also help to propose agricultural management measures to cope with future climate change.
Highlights
Over the past 100 years, global warming has become more and more significant, and it has become one of the major issues affecting the sustainable development of human society [1]
These results showed that the BCC-CSM2-MR model (BCC) projections for climate suitability were in suitable consistency with the observations and suitable for the assessment and prediction of climate suitability in the North China Plain (NCP)
The study of crop climate suitability can enhance the ability to cope with the impact of climate change on crop production
Summary
Over the past 100 years, global warming has become more and more significant, and it has become one of the major issues affecting the sustainable development of human society [1]. Global warming has exerted a significant impact on the natural environment, social economy, and human life, among which the impact on agricultural production on which human survival depends has attracted widespread attention [2–9]. Different crops have different demands for climate resources, and more or less, climate resources are not conducive to the normal growth and development of crops [10,11]. The quantity variation of key climatic factors (i.e., sunshine hours, temperature, and precipitation) can be transformed into the climate suitability of crop growth and development based on the membership function method in fuzzy mathematics [12,13]. The climate suitability for different varieties of the crop is different
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