Shifts in the abiotic and biotic environment of cultivated sunflower under future climate change

Zia Mehrabi,Navin Ramankutty,Michael Kantar,Samuel Pironon,Loren Rieseberg

doi:10.1051/ocl/2019003

Abstract

Sunflower is a unique model species for assessing crop responses and adaptation to climate change. We provide an initial assessment of how climate change may influence the abiotic and biotic environment of cultivated sunflower across the world. We find an 8% shift between current and future climate space in cultivated sunflower locations globally, and a 48% shift in Northern America, where the crop originates. Globally, the current niche occupied by sunflower crop wild relatives offer few opportunities to adapt to future climate for cultivated sunflower, but in Northern America 100% of the future climate space of cultivated sunflower is filled by the niche of primary wild relative germplasm alone (e.g. wild Helianthus annuus). Globally, we find little difference in the overlap between current and future climate space of cultivated sunflower with the niche of the important sunflower pathogen Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, but in Northern America, climate change will decrease the overlap between local populations of this pest and cultivated sunflower by 38%. Our analysis highlights the utility of multi-scale analysis for identifying candidate taxa for breeding efforts and for understanding how future climate will shift the abiotic and biotic environment of cultivated crops.

Highlights

Sunflower is a unique model species for assessing crop responses and adaptation to climate change (Badouin et al, 2017)
We find that, based on our current knowledge of where sunflower is cultivated globally, the climate niche of cultivated sunflower overlaps strongly with the climate it will likely experience in the future
On the global level we find that crop wild relatives across all gene pools which are native to Northern America would seemingly offer limited opportunity for mitigating the future climate that will be experienced by current sunflower growing locations across the world (Fig. 1E)

Summary

Introduction

Sunflower is a unique model species for assessing crop responses and adaptation to climate change (Badouin et al, 2017). To date there has been extensive work to characterise the phenotypes and genetics of sunflower crop wild relatives in their native range (Seiler 2007; Kane & Rieseberg 2007; Mandel et al, 2011; Kalyar et al, 2014; Kantar et al, 2015; Mason & Donovan 2015; Seiler et al, 2017); which, combined with the recent sequencing of the sunflower genome (Badouin et al, 2017), opens up new opportunities for expedited breeding of cultivars that are both adapted to extreme conditions and carry nutritional benefits Despite this promise, and accumulating knowledge that climate change may impact sunflower in Europe (e.g. Debaeke et al, 2017), little is still known about how the abiotic and biotic stressors of cultivated sunflower may change under future climate, and the degree to which crop wild relatives may help adapt to these shifts globally. Filling this knowledge gap is an essential first step to better understand climate adaptation for sunflower itself, and to determine how well research on sunflower may be applied to breeding climate resilient varieties in other major food crops

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Conclusion