Abstract
Aerobic rice has the potential to replace transplanted flooded rice, as rice cultivation is seriously threatened by environmental and social factors. Although the recently released upland rice cultivars have higher drought tolerance, low yield potential of these cultivars makes them less feasible for high-yielding rice planting regions under aerobic cultivation. In this study, typical lowland rice cultivars (Huanghuazhan and Yangliangyou6) were evaluated for grain yield and resource use efficiencies under aerobic cultivation as compared with upland rice cultivars (Lvhan1 and Hanyou3). Averaged across different years, lowland rice cultivars recorded 26.9%, 14.6%, and 26.6% higher grain yield, water productivity, and nitrogen use efficiency for grain production (NUEg), respectively, as compared with upland cultivars. The higher grain yield of lowland rice cultivars under aerobic cultivation was mainly attributed to the higher aboveground biomass and the spikelet number per panicle, along with a higher harvest index and panicle number per unit area with respect to upland rice cultivars. During the entire growing season in aerobic cultivation, rainfall accounted for 60% to 85% of the total water use, which indicates that lowland rice cultivars could make better use of the rainfall because of a longer growth duration and a higher growth potential. In summary, this study suggests that with appropriate irrigation, lowland rice cultivars could grow well and furnish higher yield than the current upland rice cultivars under aerobic cultivation.
Highlights
Rice (Oryza sativa L.), a major food crop for more than half of the global population, is grown in over 95 countries worldwide, and about 90% of the world rice is produced and consumed inAsia [1,2]
To provide more information for assessing the feasibility of aerobic cultivation in Central China we evaluating the growth, grain yield, and resource use efficiencies of irrigated lowland rice cultivars as compared with upland rice cultivars under aerobic cultivation
The present study evaluated the growth, grain yield, and resources use efficiencies of irrigated lowland rice cultivars as compared with upland rice cultivars under aerobic cultivation
Summary
Rice (Oryza sativa L.), a major food crop for more than half of the global population, is grown in over 95 countries worldwide, and about 90% of the world rice is produced and consumed inAsia [1,2]. Rice (Oryza sativa L.), a major food crop for more than half of the global population, is grown in over 95 countries worldwide, and about 90% of the world rice is produced and consumed in. The stability and sustainability of rice production are important for world’s food security. The sustainability and productivity of transplanted flooded rice systems are at risk owing to labor shortage, water scarcity, Agronomy 2019, 9, 591; doi:10.3390/agronomy9100591 www.mdpi.com/journal/agronomy. Compared with wheat and maize, transplanted flooded rice consumes two or three times more water because a huge amount of water is lost through percolation, surface evaporation and puddling [4]. Chauhan and Opeña (2012) concluded that puddling in a transplanted flooded rice system consumes up to one-third of the total water requirement of rice [5]
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