Identifying the Climatic Limits to Agricultural Production
Abstract
Increases in consumption associated with population growth, coupled with projected changes in surface climate over the coming decades, will present a new set of challenges to global agriculture. An increase in demand for agricultural commodities, along with a greater fraction of farmed products being diverted for uses such as energy production, is expected to result in an increase in land conversion to agricultural practice globally. Satisfying these greater demands in a sustainable manner will necessitate a re-evaluation of agricultural practices. Here we present a novel approach to the examination of the climatic limits of global agricultural production. This approach provides insight into the ecophysiological and structural trade-offs that lead to optimal production and the climatically-driven geographic variation in optimal plant species characteristics. The Jena Diversity Model (JeDi) provides a basis for examining the impacts of plant traits on survival, productivity and resource use efficiencies. JeDi has been successfully used to demonstrate the ability of a generic plant model to capture observed global patterns in plant species richness through the application of climatic constraints. The core of JeDi is a plant model that incorporates knowledge of vegetation ecophysiological and hydrological functioning. Coupled to a novel carbon allocation scheme, each plant species survives and grows as a function of the interactions between climate and the species-specific combination of ecophysiological and structural traits. Here we present extensions to the JeDi framework that allow for an examination of the combined influences of harvest practices and plant traits on optimal production in the context of human appropriation goals such as total seed harvest and above-ground biomass production. Experiments were designed to determine the geographical variation in plant species characteristics that result in the maximization of these goals, the impact of harvest practice on maximum production values, and the extent to which alternative harvest practices result in a broadening of the set of species that are most productive. These findings have implications for defining sustainable agricultural practices and for understanding the ecophysiological limits to agriculture and the associated impacts on ecosystem functioning.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFM.B23B0409D
- Keywords:
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- 0402 BIOGEOSCIENCES / Agricultural systems;
- 0414 BIOGEOSCIENCES / Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- 0466 BIOGEOSCIENCES / Modeling;
- 1843 HYDROLOGY / Land/atmosphere interactions