Fulu Tao

LUKE, CAS

Wheat radiation use efficiency (RUE) must be raised through crop breeding to further increase the yield potential, as the harvest index is now close to its theoretical limit. Field experiments, including 209 wheat cultivars which have been widely cultivated in China since the 1940s, were grown in two growing seasons (2018‐2019 and 2019‐2020) to eva...

CONTEXT The El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), one of the most well-known climate modes, can lead to large-scale climate variability and subsequent crop loss, posing a severe risk to global food security. OBJECTIVE The study's main goal was to examine the synchronous impacts of ENSO and the probability of simultaneous ENSO–related crop loss on t...

Genetic markers can be linked with eco-physiological crop models to accurately predict genotype performance and individual markers’ contributions in target environments, exploring interactions between genotype and environment. Here, wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) yield was dissected into seven traits corresponding to cultivar genetic coefficients in...

Background and aims: Physiological and morphological traits play essential roles in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) growth and development. In particular, photosynthesis is a limitation to yield. Increasing photosynthesis in wheat has been identified as an important strategy to increase yield. However, the genotypic variations and the genomic regions...

Extreme temperature, especially heat stress, is increasingly limiting wheat production, resulting in a large yield loss worldwide. Identifying the cultivars, traits and molecular mechanisms conferring extreme high temperature tolerance is essential for comprehending crop resilience to extreme climates and breeding climate-resilient cultivars. Here,...

Rice is the most important staple food in Asia. However, high-spatiotemporal-resolution rice yield datasets are limited over this large region. The lack of such products greatly hinders studies that are aimed at accurately assessing the impacts of climate change and simulating agricultural production. Based on annual rice maps in Asia, we incorpora...

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...

Plain Language Summary Forest ecosystem plays a vital role in the earth's hydrological process, and water storage capacity of forest ecosystems related to water regulation service (WSCFE) is of vital importance for human well‐being. Water can be intercepted by forest canopy, be held by litter, and be stored in soils, which accounts for more than a...

Soil moisture (SM) is a key variable of the regional hydrological cycle and has important applications for water resource and agricultural drought management. Various global soil moisture products have been mostly retrieved from microwave remote sensing data. However, currently there is rarely spatially explicit and time-continuous soil moisture in...

Accurate and spatially explicit information on global crop yield is paramount for guiding policy-making and ensuring food security. However, most public datasets are at coarse resolution in both space and time. Here, we used data-driven models to develop a 4-km dataset of global wheat yield (GlobalWheatYield4km) from 1982 to 2020. First, we propose...

Wheat is the most widely grown food crop, with 761 Mt produced globally in 2020. To meet the expected grain demand by mid-century, wheat breeding strategies must continue to improve upon yield-advancing physiological traits, regardless of climate change impacts. Here, the best performing doubled haploid (DH) crosses with an increased canopy photosy...

CONTEXT Concerns about the effects of global warming on crop yields have risen due to stagnating yield progress in recent years. Understanding crop traits and grain yield variations in different climate zones is critical to gain insights into crop response and adaptation mechanisms to ongoing climate change. However, the interactions of genotype, e...

Extreme heat is one major warming‐related threat to food security and farmers' livelihood, especially in Asia. As an economic adaptation, weather index insurance (WII) can transfer such weather‐related risks, secure farms' incomes, and recover agricultural systems soon after yield losses. However, few relevant studies evaluate its potential in the...

Investigating the impacts of climate and land use changes on the hydrological cycle and water environment at the basin scale is important for providing scientific evidence to manage the trade-offs and synergies among water resources, agricultural production and environmental protection. We used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) with various...

Accurate and spatially explicit information on crop yield over large areas is paramount for ensuring global food security and guiding policy-making. However, most public datasets are coarse resolution in both space and time. Here, we used data-driven models to develop a 4-km dataset of global wheat yield (GlobalWheatYield4km) from 1982 to 2020. Fir...

Investigating CO2 fluxes and carbon budget in agro-ecosystems is essential to develop climate smart agriculture. Here, we conducted a thorough analysis on the daily, seasonal and inter-annual variations in CO2 fluxes and carbon budget in a winter-wheat and summer-maize rotation system in the North China Plain (NCP) to better understand the CO2 flux...

Soil moisture (SM) is a key variable of regional hydrological cycle and has important applications for water resource and agricultural drought management. Various global soil moisture products have been mostly retrieved from microwave remote sensing data. However, there is currently rare spatially explicit and time-continuous soil moisture informat...

Assessing climate change impacts on crop phenology is essential for developing adaptation options. To better understand crop response and adaptation to climate change, there is an urgent need to investigate whether the impacts weakens and how crops responds to recent climate warming, as well as the roles of different drivers in crop phenology chang...

Rice is the most important staple food in Asia. However, high-spatiotemporal-resolution rice yield datasets are very limited over a large region. The lack of such products hugely hinders the studies on accurately assessing the impacts of climate change and simulating agricultural production. Based on dynamic rice maps in Asia, we incorporated four...

Detecting crop calendar changes is critically important for crop monitoring and management, but the lack of annual, Asia-wide, and long-term rice calendar datasets limits our understanding of rice phenological changes and their climate drivers. In this study, we retrieved key rice phenological dates from the GLASS AVHRR LAI through combining thresh...

Freshwater is an essential resource for human lives, agriculture, industry, and ecology. Future water supply, water withdrawal, and water security under the impacts of climate change and human interventions have been of key concern. Numerous studies have projected future changes in river runoff and surface water resources under climate change. Howe...

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...

A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 3 Highlight An ensemble of 29 wheat crop models simulates seasonal wheat growth well under locally recommended sowing conditions, but needs improvements to capture the yield response to early sowing, especially under high sowing density. Abstract Crop multi-model ensembles (MME) have proven to be effective in inc...

Crop multi-model ensembles (MME) have proven to be effective in increasing the accuracy of simulations in modelling experiments. However, the ability of a MME to capture crop response to changes in sowing dates and densities has not yet been investigated. These management interventions are some of the main levers for adapting cropping systems to cl...

Climate warming has substantially shifted plant phenology, which alters the length of growing season and consequently affects plant productivity. Recent studies showed a stalled or reversed impact of climate change on vegetation phenology since 1998, as well as an asymmetric warming effect. However, how field crop phenology responded to the recent...

Assessing global food security and developing sustainable production systems need spatially explicit information on crop harvesting areas and yields; however the available datasets are spatially and temporally coarse. Here, we developed a general framework, Global Wheat Production Mapping System (GWPMS), to map the spatial distribution of wheat har...

CONTEXT Timely information on the spatiotemporal trends in annual paddy rice planting areas (PRA) and cropping intensity (CI) in Asia is important for food security warnings and water use planning. However, long-time series datasets for these are generally unavailable. The spatiotemporal dynamics of annual paddy rice and cropping intensity over the...

Wheat has been documented to be vulnerable to climate change in broad regions of the world including China. Adaptation to future climate change by breeding climate resilient cultivars is essential. However the precise information as to where, when, and what cultivar traits should be applied to adapt to climate change in the coming decades has not b...

Investigating the spatiotemporal changes in the eco-hydrological processes and environment, as well as their drivers, is essential to manage the trade-offs among water supply, agricultural production, and environment at a basin scale. In this study, we developed a framework based on the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), together with the histo...

To meet the challenges of climate change, population growth, and an increasing food demand, an accurate, timely and dynamic yield estimation of regional and global crop yield is critical to food trade and policy-making. In this study, a machine learning method (Random Forest, RF) was used to estimate winter wheat yield in China from 2014 to 2018 by...

Climate change is projected to have an important impact on crop productivity at broad regions of the world. Crop breeders across the globe have continuously been working on development of crop cultivars to adapt to climate change, the detailed information is necessary on when and where the adaptability of current cultivars will be broken and what c...

Investigating crop phenology change has important implications to understand crop response and adaptation to climate change. The spatiotemporal changes of wheat phenology had been investigated before, nevertheless some key scientific questions remain inconclusive. Here, the updated phenological observations with the longest time period (1981–2018)...

Terrestrial ecosystem water retention (TEWR) service is subject to climate change and elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (eCO2), however, the relevant processes by which future climate change and eCO2 affect TEWR are poorly understood. Here, we use the factorial simulation experiments from the Inter‐Sectoral Impact Model Intercompari...

Chinese agricultural systems have experienced dramatic changes in crop planting area, cropping system, irrigation and fertilization managements, and crop yields in recent decades. These changes can substantially affect greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions and soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration in croplands. However, the spatiotemporal patterns, as...

Crop yield is dependent on crop biomass and harvest index. The increases in crop yield in the past benefit mainly from the increase in harvest index, the increase in biomass has been small. Light use efficiency is a bottleneck to further increase crop biomass and yield. Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is a widely cultivated cereal crop globally, provi...

The ability of crop models to decompose complex traits and integrate the underlying processes enables them to capture genotype-environment interactions in diverse environments. Integrating genomics with biophysical crop models represents a potential breakthrough technology for improving our understanding of genotype-environment interactions across...

Regional crop yield forecasting before harvest is critical for managing climate risk, optimizing agronomic management, and making food trade policy. The advantage of remote sensing data-crop model assimilation for yield estimates has been well recognized, however its potential for early-season crop yield forecasting has not yet been investigated. I...

Cropland plays an important role in Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) sequestration. Although the SOC stock and its dynamic in the past decades have been extensively investigated, the information as to where, how much, and how SOC could be potentially sequestered in the coming decades has rarely been available. Here, the Rothamsted Carbon model was applied...

Exploring the changes in wheat traits under future climate change and their contributions to yield changes is essential to improve the understanding of climate impact mechanisms and develop climate-resilient cultivars, which however has been seldom conducted. In this study, using a process-based crop model (APSIM-Wheat), meta-regression analyses, a...

An accurate paddy rice map is crucial for ensuring food security, particularly for Southeast and Northeast Asia. MODIS satellite data are useful for mapping paddy rice at continental scales but have a mixed-pixel problem caused by the coarse spatial resolution. To reduce the mixed pixels, we designed a rule-based method for mapping paddy rice by in...

Identifying crop loss at field parcel scale using satellite images is challenging: first, crop loss is caused by many factors during the growing season; second, reliable reference data about crop loss are lacking; third, there are many ways to define crop loss. This study investigates the feasibility of using satellite images to train machine learn...

Hydrological models or remote sensing methods are often used to estimate water retention amounts and to analyze large spatial variations in water retention across large scales. However, the accuracies of hydrological models and remote sensing data are far lower than those of site-observational data. Here, we used 1045 observational sites of forest...

Crop hybrid improvement is an efficient and environmental-friendly option to adapt to climate change and increase grain production. However, the adaptability of existing hybrids to a changing climate has not been systematically investigated. Therefore, little is known about the appropriate timing of hybrid adaptation. Here, using a novel hybrid mod...

The disparity in unit irrigation water consumption (UIWC) of different cropping systems provides an opportunity to reduce total irrigation water consumption (TIWC) by optimizing cropping systems. However, the UIWC for diverse cropping systems has neither been systematically quantified nor been optimized at a national scale. Here, we quantify the cr...

Process-based grass models (PBGMs) are widely used for predicting grass growth under potential climate change and different management practices. However, accurate predictions using PBGMs heavily rely on field observations for data assimilation. In data-limited areas, performing robust and reliable estimates of grass growth remains a challenge. In...

Global warming threatens food security through causing increasing and severe yield losses from heat extremes, especially for smallholder rice-cropping farmers in Asia. Weather index insurance (WII) could transfer weather-related risks, secure farms’ income, and recover agricultural systems. Under future warming scenarios, however, the related studi...

Estimating terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) accurately at various temporal and spatial scales is crucial for understanding the hydrological cycle and water resource management. The currently available ET estimates have some uncertainties and need to be further improved. In this study, six machine learning methods including the random forests, su...

Crop phenology exerts measurable impacts on soil surface properties, biophysical processes and climate feedbacks, particularly at local or regional scales. Nevertheless, the response of surface biophysical processes to climate feedbacks as affected by sowing date in winter wheat croplands has been overlooked, especially during winter dormancy. The...

Identifying crop loss at field parcel scale using satellite images is challenging: first, crop loss is caused by many factors during the growing season; second, reliable reference data about crop loss are lacking; third, there are many ways to define crop loss. This study investigates the feasibility of using satellite images from Landsat 7 to trai...

Climate, land use/cover, and leaf area index (LAI) have changed notably in China since 1980, and these have had major impacts on river runoff and the terrestrial ecosystem water retention (TEWR) service in China. However, the mechanisms underlying the spatiotemporal changes of runoff and TEWR are not understood well. Here, meteorological, LAI, and...

Developing climate-smart agricultural systems has become an important strategy to meet the food production, environmental and economic goals simultaneously. However, the comprehensive analyses on the climate-smartness of current agricultural production systems have been lack. Here, we assessed the changes in agricultural production systems and thei...

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of water yield using the irrigated cropland water model and land use data. • Water consumption dominated the water yield variability in the midstream YRB (95.73%±0.5%) • The increased local water use and change in water yield from upstream increased the human water use stress downstream. In response to t...

Forest ecosystems play a vital role in the earth’s hydrological process, and precipitation intercepted by forests accounts for more than a quarter of the water in the terrestrial hydrologic cycle. However, water retention in the three layers (canopy, litter, and soil) of forest ecosystems has not yet been thoroughly investigated on a global scale....

To meet the challenges of climate change, increasing population and food demand, a timely, accurate and reliable estimation of crop yield at a large scale is more imperative than ever for crop management, food security evaluation, food trade and policy-making. In this study, taking the major winter wheat production regions of China as an example, w...

Timely and reliable yield prediction at a large scale is imperative and prerequisite to prevent climate risk and ensure food security, especially with climate change and increasing extreme climate events. In this study, integrating the publicly available data (i.e., satellite vegetation indexes, meteorological indexes, and soil properties) within t...

Abstract Producing enough food to feed a growing population is a great future challenge, especially for vulnerable areas in Africa. There is limited understanding of food security under future climate conditions, particularly under the warming target stipulated in the Paris Agreement. Maize is the most widely cultivated crop in Africa. Taking maize...

The land cover and management changes have strong feedbacks to climate through surface biophysical and biochemical processes. Agricultural phenology dynamic exerted measurable impacts on land surface properties, biophysical process and climate feedback in particular times at local/regional scale. But the responses of climate feedback through surfac...

Understanding the interactive effects of different warming levels and tillage managements on crop morphological and physiological traits and radiation use efficiency (RUE) is essential for breeding climate‐resilient cultivars. Here, we conducted temperature free‐air controlled enhancement (T‐FACE) experiments on winter wheat during two growth seaso...

The land surface characteristic influences climatic environments by controlling the land surface energy and water fluxes. Although large progresses have been made in coupling detailed crop models into land surface models, there is much room left for improved estimates of surface fluxes in double cropping system, such as the winter wheat (Triticum a...

Assimilating remote sensing data with crop growth model is a promising method to estimate crop yields over a large area. However, the method is always subject to the problems with biases in remote sensing products and assimilation weights in practical applications. In this study, we demonstrated the robustness of a ‘spatial assimilation’ method in...

Assimilating multi-source data into crop models is a promising way to improve crop growth simulations and yield estimations over a large area. Most of previous studies have mainly assimilated one of the observed/retrieved variables such as leaf area index (LAI) or soil moisture. However, assimilating multi-source data into a model and evaluating th...

Rainfall-related hazards—deficit rain and excessive rain—inevitably stress crop production, and weather index insurance is one possible financial tool to mitigate such agro-metrological losses. In this study, we investigated where two rainfall-related weather indices—anomaly-based index (AI) and humidity-based index (HI)—could be best used for thre...

Smallholder farmers in sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) currently grow rainfed maize with limited inputs including fertilizer. Climate change may exacerbate current production constraints. Crop models can help quantify the potential impact of climate change on maize yields, but a comprehensive multi‐model assessment of simulation accuracy and uncertainty i...

Reliable and continuous information on major crop harvesting areas is fundamental to investigate land surface dynamics and make policies affecting agricultural production, land use, and sustainable development. However, there is currently no spatially explicit and time-continuous crop harvesting area information with a high resolution for China. Th...

Abstract Climate change may have major influences on surface runoff, which would consequently result in important implications for terrestrial ecosystems and human well‐being. At global scale there is limited understanding of these issues with respect to the warming targets stipulated in the Paris Agreement. Here we use a well‐established hydrologi...