Di He

China Agricultural University | CAU · Department of Agricultural Meteorology

Within field variations of plant available water capacity (PAWC) of soil is one of the major causes of spatial yield variability in dryland agriculture systems, as PAWC interacts with pre-season and in-season rainfall and other climatic variables to determine crop growth and final yield. Quantification of such variations helps to better understand...

To better understand how climate change might influence global canola production, scientists from six countries have completed the first inter-comparison of eight crop models for simulating growth and seed yield of canola, based on experimental data from six sites across five countries. A sensitivity analysis was conducted with a combination of fiv...

Plant available water capacity (PAWC), defined as the amount of water held in the soil between the drained upper limit (DUL) and crop lower limit (CLL), is a major determinant for crop yield in dryland cropping areas. However, measured soil profile data quantifying the physical soil parameters that determine PAWC are limited. Choosing a ‘representa...

Intercropping of two or more crop species increases the efficiency of resource use and often produces a greater yield per unit land area. The relative efficiency of intercropping depends on row configuration, but there is a shortage of modelling-based evaluation of alternative intercropping options due to the inadequacy of standard process-based cr...

Aims Quantification of variations in plant available water holding capacity (PAWC) of soils helps to improve yield forecast and inform spatially variable management practices in dryland agriculture systems. We developed and tested a general inverse approach to estimate PAWC from crop yield. Methods The APSIM model was used to simulate wheat yield...

Wheat growth, development, and grain yield are affected by global climate warming. The general consensus is that global warming shortens the overall length of wheat growing period and reduces global wheat yield. Here, focusing on China, the largest wheat producer in the world, we show that warming increases wheat yield in most winter wheat growing...

Soil water directly or indirectly affects almost all ecological processes. Soil available water capacity (AWC), the difference between field capacity, or drained upper limit (DUL), and wilting point, or lower limit (LL15), and saturated water content (SAT) are among the most important soil hydraulic properties controlling soil water dynamics. These...

Improving winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) productivity and water use efficiency (WUE) in the North China Plain (NCP) is critical to maintain grain security and ease the water shortage in this region. This study was conducted to examine the optimal irrigation amount (OI) for winter wheat across the NCP and analyze its responses to the climate, s...

Climate change, with increased temperatures and varied rainfall, poses a great challenge to food security around the world. Appropriately assessing the impacts of climate change on crop productivity and understanding the adaptation potential of agriculture to climate change are urgently needed to help develop effective strategies for future agricul...

Background and aims: Functional-structural plant (FSP) models provide insights into the complex interactions between plant architecture and underlying developmental mechanisms. However, parameter estimation of FSP models remains challenging. We therefore used pattern-oriented modelling (POM) to test whether parameterisation of FSP models can be ma...

Soils provide the structural support, water and nutrients for plants in nature and are considered to be the foundation of agriculture production. Improving soil quality and soil health has been advocated as the goal of soil management toward sustainable agricultural intensification. There have been renewed efforts to define and quantify soil qualit...

Plant available water holding capacity (PAWC) influences the efficiency of rainfall used by crops and consequently crop productivity in dryland cropping systems. However, how soil PAWC interacts with rainfall to determine crop yield has not been quantified systematically. In this study, we used an agricultural production systems model (APSIM) and w...

This paper combines the analysis of soybean growth data with modelling to quantify cultivar differences and to evaluate the ability of the APSIM-Soybean model for simulation of soybean biomass and grain yield. Crop data include main developmental stages, leaf area index (LAI), above ground biomass, grain yield and grain number of 72 soybean cultiva...

The irrigation water requirement (IR) is crucial for optimizing agricultural water management and reallocation and for adjusting the planting structure. Based on the datasets derived from 277 meteorological stations and 42 agro-meteorological stations from 1980 to 2012, the simplified water balance equation was employed to estimate the IR in the wi...

Wheat production in Southwest China (SWC) plays a vital role in guaranteeing local grain security, but it is threatened by increasingly frequent seasonal drought in recent years. In spite of the importance, the impact of past climate change on wheat potential productivity and drought severity has not been properly addressed. In this study, we emplo...

Understanding the interactions of genotype (G) × environment (E) × management (M) and their impact on crop yield enables prediction of the performance of genotypes across environment. It can help select the most suitable cultivars in target regions and identify contributions of novel traits in crop breeding. In this study, we used the process-based...

While process-based crop models are increasingly applied in multiple research areas, the role of model calibration and its data requirement have been rarely addressed. We used data for two canola cultivars measured across up to six sowing dates, five plant densities and three years to investigate how different data impacted on the efficacy of calib...

Accurate modelling of crop phenology is essential for evaluating how crops respond to future environmental and management changes. However, cultivar parameters are often estimated based on limited data and using a trial-and-error method, leading to uncertainties in simulated phenology and subsequent crop yield. In this paper we evaluated the abilit...

The aim of this study is to compare the impacts of climate change on the potential productivity and potential productivity gaps of sunflower (Helianthus annuus), potato (Solanum tuberosum), and spring wheat (Triticumaestivum Linn) in the agro-pastoral ecotone (APE) of North China. A crop growth dynamics statistical method was used to calculate the...

Southwest China (SWC) is one of the major canola production areas in China. Due to frequent seasonal drought during the canola growing season, irrigation plays a vital role in improving canola yields. However, the impact of irrigation and climate variations on canola yield and the yield gap (the difference between potential and rainfed yield) has n...

The impact of climate change on maize potential productivity and the potential productivity gap in Southwest China (SWC) are investigated in this paper. We analyze the impact of climate change on the photosynthetic, light-temperature, and climatic potential productivity of maize and their gaps in SWC, by using a crop growth dynamics statistical met...

Sowing date is one of the vital factors for determining crop yield. In this study, temporal and spatial variation of optimal sowing date of summer maize was analyzed by statistical model and the APSIM-Maize model in Henan Province, China. The results showed that average summer maize optimal sowing dates ranged from May 30 to June 13 across Henan Pr...

Crop phenology is related to the partitioning of assimilates to different organs, crop productivity and timing of crop management. Understanding the uncertainty in simulated crop phenology can help target future direction of model improvement and assess climate change impact more accurately. However, the uncertainty in maize phenology modelling acr...

It has long been concerned how crop water use efficiency (WUE) responds to climate change. Most of existing researches have emphasized the impact of single climate factor but have paid less attention to the effect of developed agronomic measures on crop WUE. Based on the long-term field observations/experiments data, we investigated the changing re...

The water footprint of production(WFP) refers to the water resource consumed per unit of products. For crops，WFP is represented by the volume of water needed to produce per unit mass of products. The impact of climate change on the water footprint of production is an important scientific issue about which agricultural producers concern. Based on th...

Northern China is one of the most densely populated regions in the world. Agricultural activities have intensified since the 1980s to provide food security to the country. However, this intensification has likely contributed to an increasing scarcity in water resources, which may in turn be endangering food security. Based on in-situ measurements o...

Climate change has affected all aspects of human societal development as a global problem, especially agriculture, which is closely related to human survival. Evaluating vulnerability can be helpful in assessing the impact of climate change and analyzing the effectiveness and adaptive degrees of different countermeasures to provide a reliable basis...

Field experimental data of winter wheat and parallel daily meteorological data at four typical stations in Chongqing City were used to calibrate and validate APSIM-wheat model and determine the genetic parameters for 12 varieties of winter wheat. The results showed that there was a good agreement between the simulated and observed growth periods fr...

Climate change has affected all aspects of human societal development as a global problem, especially agriculture, which is closely related to human survival. Evaluating vulnerability can be helpful in assessing the impact of climate change and analyzing the effectiveness and adaptive degrees of different countermeasures to provide a reliable basis...

Water resource is one of the major constraints to agricultural production in central and western Inner Mongolia, where are characteristic by arid and semi-arid climate. Reference crop evapotranspiration (ET 0) is an important part of water cycle in agricultural ecosystem, which has a direct effect on crop growth and yield. The implications of clima...

Cultivated land quality is a key factor of national economic and social sustainable development. The change of cultivated land quality with climate change has become one of the hot research areas in global change in recent years. Based on the meteorological data, soil information and field experimental data were used, utilizing the Wageninngen meth...