Bin Wang

• PhD
• Senior Research Scientist at New South Wales Department of Primary Industries

Accurate measurement, monitoring, and prediction of soil organic carbon (SOC) are fundamental to supporting climate change mitigation efforts and promoting sustainable agricultural practices. This review discusses recent advances in methodologies and technologies for SOC quantification, including remote sensing (RS), proximal soil sensing (PSS), ar...

Context Plastic film mulching (PM) is a widely adopted technique for enhancing crop yield in arid and semiarid regions. However, the improved soil hydrothermal conditions under PM may accelerate the mineralization of soil organic carbon (SOC) and increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Concurrently, crop stubble return, while widely recognized for...

Enhancing food-system resilience is critical in the face of increasing climate variability that threatens food security. Large-scale climate oscillations are key drivers of climate conditions that disrupt agricultural productivity. However, how such effects are shifting under greenhouse warming remains unclear. Here, we integrate machine learning w...

Process-based models (PBMs) and artificial intelligence models (AIMs) are both widely used to simulate crop growth under various environmental conditions and farm management practices. PBMs offer the advantage of interpretable simulations due to their mechanistic underpinnings, but the latest insights from crop growth mechanism research are often n...

Soybean is a critical agricultural product in China, with domestic production unable to satisfy the substantial demand, leading to a huge reliance on imports. To support the scientific formulation of agricultural policies and the optimization of domestic planting structures, we developed a high-resolution annual soybean yield dataset for China (200...

Global climate change has significantly altered extreme rainfall regimes in Australia. However, the spatiotemporal distribution of extreme dry and wet conditions, and their relationship with the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), particularly within Australian broadacre zones (high rainfall, wheat-sheep, and pastoral zones), remains poorly unders...

Sugarcane is an important crop for global food and energy production. However, its production is greatly affected by inter-annual climate variations in major production regions. While previous studies have assessed climate impacts on sugarcane yield at individual sites, a regional-scale understanding of the climate-yield relationship remains unclea...

Adjusting sowing dates and rates are effective measures for winter wheat to adapt to future climate change in achieving high yields. However, the combined influence of sowing date and sowing rate on winter wheat yield and water use efficiency (WUE) under plastic mulching (PM) conditions, particularly in the context of climate change, remains unexpl...

Vegetation is a fundamental component of terrestrial ecosystems, and accurately assessing the effects of seasonal climate variations, extreme weather events, and land use changes on vegetation dynamics is crucial. The Ganjiang River Basin (GRB), a key region for water conservation and recharge in southeastern China, has experienced significant land...

The Poyang Lake Basin (PLB) has a long-standing history of drought, which has been intensified by global warming, posing significant risks to water security and agriculture. However, the specific patterns of drought, particularly seasonal variations, remain poorly understood, making it crucial to investigate these dynamics for effective water manag...

Context Global food production is facing severe challenges due to climate change. Previous climate-crop modeling studies have developed multiple adaptation strategies, such as adjusting sowing dates, densities, and optimizing cultivars, to counteract the negative impacts of climate change. In northwest China, plastic mulching (PM) is extensively ut...

The soil’s variable capacity to store water, known as plant available water capacity (PAWC), may mitigate the adverse effects of drought on crop yields. Nonetheless, the extent to which this mitigation can decrease the probability of crop productivity loss under various drought scenarios, as well as the specific thresholds at which drought begins t...

Extreme precipitation poses a significant threat to crop production, often underestimated by process-based models. State-of-the-art models also struggle with high-resolution spatial applications due to process complexity. Here, we developed a Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning (KGML) framework that integrates machine learning with a waterlogging-ena...

Plastic film mulching (PM) combined with irrigation is widely adopted to improve crop yields, water and nitrogen efficiency, especially in arid farming areas. Despite its benefits, the effects of this method on soil quality and its subsequent impact on crop productivity and resource efficiency have not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, w...

Apple is one of the globally significant perennial fruits, with high consumption driven by the demand for nutritional food diversity and population growth. There is a lack of understanding with respect to the potential consequences of climate change, particularly the impact of spring frost-a frequent agrometeorological disaster on apple yield. Here...

Uneven precipitation during the growing season and frequent seasonal droughts on the Loess Plateau in Northwest China adversely affect crop production and water use efficiency. While plastic mulching (PM) has been used to alleviate water stress, few studies have examined the traits maize cultivars need to adapt to the altered water environment unde...

Mixed farming systems play a crucial role in Australian agriculture, offering economic, social, and environmental advantages. However, these systems are vulnerable to climate change, characterized by rising temperatures and increased rainfall variability. We utilized the pre-calibrated AusFarm model, forced with daily climate data downscaled from 2...

Both climate and impact models are essential for understanding and quantifying the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity. Multi-model ensembles have highlighted considerable uncertainties in these assessments, yet a systematic approach to quantify these uncertainties is lacking. We propose a standardized approach to attribute uncert...

Drought is projected to intensify under warming climate and will continuously threaten global food security. Assessing the risk of yield loss due to drought is key to developing effective agronomic options for farmers and policymakers. However, little has been known about determining the likelihood of reduced crop yield under different drought cond...

The use of observation-dependent methods for crop productivity and food security assessment is challenging in data-sparse regions. This study presents a transferable framework and applies it to North Korea (NK) to assess rice productivity based on climate similarity, transferable machine-learning techniques, and extendable multi-source data. We ini...

Plastic film mulching (PM) has been extensively used to increase crop yields in dryland regions in China. However, the impact of differently colored PM on crop radiation utilization due to the optical properties of the underlying PM surfaces remains unclear. We conducted a two-year field experiment in northwest China to evaluate the dynamics of pho...

Australia, characterized by extensive and heterogeneous terrestrial ecosystems, plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle and in efforts to mitigate climate change. Prior research has quantified vegetation productivity and carbon balance within the Australian context over preceding decades. Nonetheless, the responses of vegetation and carbon...

Droughts cause significant economic losses in many regions around the world. Remote sensing technologies and machine learning offer promising solutions for timely regional drought monitoring, but the accuracy of such approaches is constrained by both the conceptual design and algorithms underpinning such approaches. We developed a machine learning...

CONTEXT: Maize production in China is facing a multitude of challenges such as climate change, increasing demand, and limited cropland availability. Soil properties, beyond supporting crop growth and development, can play a critical role in buffering the impacts of climate crisis on crop yields. However, little information is known about such buffe...

Agricultural sustainability is threatened by pressures from water scarcity, energy crises, escalating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and diminishing farm profitability. Practices that diversify crop rotations, retain crop residues, and incorporate cover crops have been widely studied for their impacts on soil organic carbon and crop production. Ho...

The widespread adoption of returning crop residue to regulate soil properties and improve yields has been well-established. However, the long-term effects of residue return on soil organic carbon (SOC) and yield in film-mulched farmland, especially under future climate conditions, are still unclear. To address this issue, we utilized the SPACSYS mo...

The impacts of compound drought-heat (DH) events on crops are more devastating than a single extreme event of drought or heat. Previous studies mainly assessed the change of individual extreme climate events. However, studies quantifying the characteristics of DH events during crop growth periods are still lacking. To the best of our knowledge, the...

Study region: New South Wales, southeast Australia Study focus: Estimating potential evapotranspiration (ETp) rates, detecting its temporal trends and analysing its interannual oscillation are critical for long-term assessment of water availability and regional drought. This study aimed to evaluate the comprehensive performance of 12 simplified mod...

Linked climate and crop simulation models are widely used to assess the impact of climate change on agriculture. However, it is unclear how ensemble configurations (model composition and size) influence crop yield projections and uncertainty. Here, we investigate the influences of ensemble configurations on crop yield projections and modeling uncer...

CONTEXT Enhancing the climate resilience of local food systems with adaptation options related to cultivar, irrigation, sowing, and fertilization presents significant opportunities for ensuring food security under climate change. The climate-crop modeling method is one of the main ways to customize climate adaptation strategies. However, there is a...

The dew is closely related to the micro-use water of plants and the large-scale hydrological processes, its formation on grassland plays a vital role especially in maintaining the eco-hydrological cycle. We used structural equation modelling to investigate how environmental factors would affect dew formation on alpine graminoid-Kobresia meadow in n...

Robust crop yield projections under future climates are fundamental prerequisites for reliable policy formation. Both process-based crop models and statistical models are commonly used for this purpose. Process-based models tend to simplify processes, minimize effects of extreme events, and ignore biotic pressures, while statistic al models cannot...

Australia has experienced increasing number of heatwave events (HWEs) in recent decades. This study aims to examine key synoptic features of austral summer HWEs over Australia during 1950/1951–2019/2020. Based on ERA5‐reanalysis and rotated empirical orthogonal functions, HWEs in Australia are categorized into four types according to where they oft...

A risk-based approach is more meaningful to quantify the effects of drought on crop yield given the randomness nature of past drought events, compared to the deterministic approach. However, the majority of these probabilistic studies are conducted at national or global scale to assess the yield loss probability under given drought conditions. Ther...

Conservation agriculture management practices (e.g., cover crops and residue retention) have been widely promoted to improve soil quality and environmental sustainability. However, little is known about the long-term interactive effects of cover crops and residue retention on yield of the cash crops and environmental outcomes in dryland cropping sy...

The crop-growing region of Western Australia characterized by a Mediterranean-type climate is projected to become warmer and drier. Appropriate selection of crop sequences will be of importance to cope with these climatic changes for this largest grain-producing region of Australia. Through linking a widely used crop model (APSIM), 26 General Circu...

Forecasting water deficit is challenging because it is modulated by uncertain climate, different environmental and anthropic factors, especially in arid and semi-arid northwestern China. The monthly water deficit index D at 44 sites in northwestern China over 1961−2020 were calculated. The key large-scale circulation indices related to D were scree...

Extreme weather events threaten food security, yet global assessments of impacts caused by crop waterlogging are rare. Here we first develop a paradigm that distils common stress patterns across environments, genotypes and climate horizons. Second, we embed improved process-based understanding into a farming systems model to discern changes in glob...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) can influence atmospheric CO2 concentration and then the extent to which the climate emergency is mitigated globally. It follows the elucidation of the driving factors of cropland SOC stocks, which is fundamental to reducing soil carbon loss and promoting soil carbon sequestration. Here, we examined the influence of enviro...

Dew is closely related to the micro-use of water and to large-scale hydrological processes. Dew formation on grasslands plays a particularly vital role in maintaining the ecohydrological cycle, however, its characteristics and sources were rarely reported. Here, stable isotope for dew, ambient water vapor, soil water, plant water, creek water, and...

The alpine grassland shrubbization of the northern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau on the background of global change and overgrazing, is a prominent and serious problem. However, the water competition ability of shrubs and alpine grasslands is rarely reported. Here, we tracked the δ O and δ H of soil water, plant water, precipitation, and groundwater, analy...

The relationships between crop productivity and climate variability drivers are often assumed to be stationary over time. However, this may not be true in a warming climate. Here we use a crop model and a machine learning algorithm to demonstrate the changing impacts of climate drivers on wheat productivity in Australia. We find that, from the end...

CONTEXT: Farming systems face the dual pressures of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to mitigate climate change and safeguarding food security to adapt to climate change. Building soil organic carbon (SOC) is a key strategy for climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, practices that increase SOC may also increase nitrous oxide (N2O...

Assessing the impacts of both climate and land use changes on hydrologic variables is crucial for sustainable development of water resources and natural ecosystems. We conducted a case study of a catchment in southwestern Australia to assess the impacts of future climate and land use changes, both separately and in combination, on water resource av...

Potato production plays an important role in safeguarding food security in China since the central government implemented the ‘Potato-as-Staple-Food’ policy in 2015. However, a key challenge facing China's potato production is to realize a tradeoff between economic return and environmental impact. Effective strategies for reducing carbon emission w...

The impacts of global climate warming on maize yield vary regionally. However, less is known about how soil modulates regionally-specific impacts and soil properties that are able to alleviate adverse impacts of climate warming on maize productivity. In this study, we investigated the impacts of multiple soil inherent properties on the sensitivity...

Extreme weather events threaten food security, yet global ssessments of crop waterlogging are rare. Here, we make three important contributions to the literature. First, we develop a paradigm that distils common stress patterns across environments, genotypes and climate horizons. Second, we embed improved process-based understanding into a contempo...

Adaptation based on social resilience is proposed as an effective measure to mitigate hunger and avoid food shocks caused by climate change. But these have not been investigated comprehensively in climate-sensitive regions. North Korea (NK) and its neighbours, South Korea and China, represent three economic levels that provide us with examples for...

Runoff projection under future climate scenarios has been widely studied to investigate the impacts of climate change on regional water availability. However, uncertainty in runoff projection due to different ETp inputs has not been fully assessed. This study firstly adopted the physically-based Penman model, temperature-based Hargreaves model, and...

Global warming and anthropogenic activities have imposed noticeable impacts on rainfall pattern changes at both spatial and temporal scales in recent decades. Systematic diagnosis of rainfall pattern changes is urgently needed at spatiotemporal scales for a deeper understanding of how climate change produces variations in rainfall patterns. The obj...

Providing accurate crop yield estimations at large spatial scales and understanding yield losses under extreme climate stress is an urgent challenge for sustaining global food security. While the data-driven deep learning approach has shown great capacity in predicting yield patterns, its capacity to detect and attribute the impacts of climatic ext...

Simple Summary Adopting deficit irrigation (DI) to improve crop production and safeguard groundwater resources is of great importance in water scarce regions, e.g., the North China Plain (NCP). Under the background of global warming, it is worth investigating whether DI continues to play such a key role under future climate change scenarios. Thus,...

CONTEXT: The potential of climate adaptation has been widely investigated with a climate-crop modeling approach. Although different sources of uncertainty in projected crop yields have been quantified in climate change impact assessments, uncertainty in simulating the crop adaptation to future climate has not been fully assessed. OBJECTIVE: The obj...

Studying the interrelation of soil water and plant water is essential for an in-depth understanding of eco-hydrological processes. However, water use relationships and comparative studies between shrubs and alpine grassland of the northern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau remain poorly understood. In this study, we compared δ18O and δ2H values of water from s...

Climate change poses a great challenge to global food security. Recently the combination of crop models (CMs), global climate models (GCMs), and species distribution models (SDMs) has been applied to assess the impacts of climate change on crop production with consideration of changes of crop climate-suitable regions. However, little is known about...

Crop yield is controlled by different environmental factors. Multi-source data for site-specific soils, climates, and remotely sensed vegetation indices are essential for yield prediction. Algorithms of data-model fusion for crop growth monitoring and yield prediction are complicated and need to be optimized to deal with model uncertainty. This stu...

Australia’s primary production sector operates in one of the world’s most variable climates with future climate change posing a challenge to its ongoing sustainability. Recognising this, Australia has invested in understanding climate change risks to primary production with a substantial amount of research produced. Recently, focus on this research...

The increase of extreme climate events under a warming climate has and will continue to threaten the growth and development of maize across the North China Plain (NCP). Understanding and assessing the spatiotemporal changes of future extreme climate events during the maize growth period are essential for developing adaptation strategies to reduce t...

With a rapidly increasing global population and increasing uncertainty over food security, farmers are facing a dilemma of producing crops with a higher yield on the same (or even less) cultivated areas. More specifically, the mean growth rate of global crop yield must exceed 2.4% per year to feed 10 billio n people by 2050s. However, the ongoing c...

Global climate change results in more extreme temperature events, which poses a serious threat to wheat production in the North China Plain (NCP). Assessing the potential impact of temperature extremes on crop growth and yield is an important prerequisite for exploring crop adaptation measures to deal with changing climate. In this study, we evalua...

CONTEXT Agricultural vulnerability assessment is a comprehensive and powerful analytical tool to locate hotspots with states of susceptibility to harm and powerlessness of agricultural system. It plays an important role in guiding policy makers to plan and implement adaptation practices to mitigate potential climate risks to crop. However, due to t...

Cropping of rice and wheat in rotation (Triticum aestivum L.) contiguously in the same field is a fundamental pillar of double-cropping systems in southern China. Yields of such cropping systems are increasingly challenged as climate change (CC) drives increases in autumnal rainfall, delaying rice harvesting and subsequent sowing of wheat. Here, ou...

Reforestation is identified as one of the key nature-based solutions to deliver carbon dioxide removal, which will be required to achieve the net zero ambition of the Paris Agreement. However, the potential for sequestration through reforestation is uncertain because climate change is expected to affect the drivers of forest growth. This study used...

Global warming and altered precipitation patterns pose a serious threat to crop production in the North China Plain (NCP). Quantifying the frequency of adverse climate events (e.g., frost, heat and drought) under future climates and assessing how those climatic extreme events would affect yield are important to effectively inform and make science-b...

Alpine grassland has very important water conservation function. Grassland degradation seriously affects the water conservation function; moreover, there is little understanding of the change of water state during grassland restoration. Our study aims to bridge this gap and improve our understanding of changes in soil moisture during the restoratio...

Rising temperatures and frequent extreme high temperature events under future climate scenarios have posed pressing challenges with respect to global food security. Previous climate-crop modelling studies have investigated the impacts of rising temperature and heat stress on grain yield. However, the potential and priority of dealing with rising me...

Global warming and altered precipitation patterns, which poses a serious threat to wheat production in the North China Plain (NCP). Quantifying the frequency of adverse climate events (e.g. frost, heat and drought) under future climates and assessing how those climatic extreme events would affect yield are important to effectively inform and make s...

Climate change (CC) in central China will change seasonal patterns of agricultural production through increasingly frequent extreme climatic events (ECEs). Breeding climate-resilient wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes may mitigate adverse effects of ECEs on crop productivity. To reveal crop traits conducive to long-term yield improvement in the...

Digital soil maps of soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration potential resulting from a hypothetical 10% relative increase in long-term vegetation cover are presented at 100 m resolution across the state of New South Wales (NSW) in southeast Australia. This land management outcome is considered realistically achievable for many land managers, using...

In Australia, the proportion of forest area that burns in a typical fire season is less than for other vegetation types. However, the 2019−2020 austral spring-summer was an exception, with over four times the previous maximum area burnt in southeast Australian temperate forests. Temperate forest fires have extensive socio-economic, human health, gr...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a key role in the sequestration of carbon that could otherwise be warming the atmosphere. Climate change including increased temperature and changed rainfall will greatly impact the global SOC cycle. There are still significant gaps in our knowledge of the size of the global SOC pool and how future climate will affec...

Adaption based on social resilience is proposed as effective measures to mitigate hunger and avoid disaster caused by climate change. But these have not been investigated comprehensively in climate-sensitive regions especially necessary-quantitative paths. North Korea (NK, undeveloped) and its neighbors (SK, South Korea, developed; China, developin...

Accurate and timely crop yield forecasts can provide essential information to make conclusive agricultural policies and to conduct investments. Recent studies have used different machine learning techniques to develop such yield forecast systems for single crops at regional scales. However, no study has used multiple sources of environmental predic...

We used the APSIM-Maize model to simulate maize potential yield (Yp) and rain-fed yield (Yw) when adaptation options of sowing date and planting density were adopted under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 in the Guanzhong Plain of China. The results showed that Yp would decrease by 10.6–14.9% and 15.0–31.4% under RCP4.5 and RC...

Crop production in the North China Plain (NCP) is heavily influenced by the unfolding climate change and water shortage. Groundwater overdraft for irrigation in this region has caused serious ecological and environmental problems. Cropping systems adjustment offers an effective approach for the sustainable use of groundwater. However, the assessmen...

Understanding sources of uncertainty in climate–crop modelling is critical for informing adaptation strategies for cropping systems. An understanding of the major sources of uncertainty in yield change is needed to develop strategies to reduce the total uncertainty. Here, we simulated rain-fed wheat cropping at four representative locations in Chin...

Understanding changes in rainfall at a continental scale can inform adaptation and resilience in all sectors that are sensitive to rainfall. This study examined spatiotemporal changes in annual and seasonal rainfall, extreme and non‐extreme rainfall, and their probability and intensity over the period from 1960 to 2019 across Australia for six rain...

Climate change can have critical impacts on ecosystem services (ESs) and their inter-relationships, especially for water-related services. However, there has been little work done on characterizing the current and future changes in these services and their inter-relationships under a changing climate. Based on the revised universal soil loss equati...

The Primary Industries sector presents a myriad of opportunities for emissions abatement. Agriculture is a major source of emissions as well as delivering significant abatement through vegetation-based sequestration. The sector is well placed to play a significant role in contributing to both short (2030) and long term (2050) emissions reduction ta...

Australia is one of the top wheat exporting countries in the world and the reliable prediction of wheat production plays a key role in ensuring regional and global food security. However, wheat yield in Australia is highly exposed to the impacts of climate variability, especially seasonal rainfall, as wheat is mostly grown in the drylands. Previous...

Projection of drought under a changing climate is important for drought risk assessment. Changes in precipitation (P) and potential evapotranspiration (ETp) are expected to influence future drought occurrence. Thus, it is important to include both factors to accurately quantify change in drought frequency under future climate scenarios. Standardize...

Probabilistic seasonal rainfall forecasting is of great importance for stakeholders such as farmers and policymakers to assist in developing risk management strategies and to inform decisions. In practice, there are two kinds of commonly used tools, dynamical models and statistical models, to provide probabilistic seasonal rainfall forecasts. Dynam...

Future extreme climate events will become more intense and frequent with global warming, which is a great threat to wheat productivity in the North China Plain (NCP). Projecting future changes in extreme climate events is an important prerequisite for exploring crop adaptation measures to climate variation. In this study, we calculated 11 extreme c...

Climate change in China would cause change into precipitation patterns and rise in temperature. The assessment of climate change impact on Chinese wheat production is needed for both rainfed and irrigated farming in order to maintain wheat self-sufficiency and to assure future food demand. The current study assesses the future trends of wheat yield...

The Tibetan Plateau has been undergoing accelerated warming over recent decades, and is considered an indicator for broader global warming phenomena. However, our understanding of warming rates with elevation in complex mountain regions is incomplete. The most serious concern is the lack of high‐quality near‐surface air temperature (Tair) datasets...

An optimal flowering period (OFP) minimises the long-term combined risk of extreme weather events on crop yield and exists in all environments. With climate change, the frequency, timing and intensity of these events are likely to change, which in turn may shift the OFP. It is important to explore how the OFP would change under a future climate. Kn...

Climate change has already and will continue to exert a vital impact on crop yield and water use in the North China Plain (NCP). Currently, this plain is facing a dilemma between groundwater depletion and grain production demand. It is urgent to identify the impact of future climate change on crop yield and water consumption and then develop effici...