Senthold Asseng

Technische Universität München | TUM · School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan

France suffered, in 2016, the most extreme wheat yield decline in recent history, with some districts losing 55% yield. To attribute causes, we combined the largest coherent detailed wheat field experimental dataset with statistical and crop model techniques, climate information, and yield physiology. The 2016 yield was composed of up to 40% fewer...

CONTEXT - Technological innovations in agriculture are mainly driven by the maxim: increase productivity at any costs. Today, in the face of climate change and an unprecedented loss of biodiversity, this approach is reaching its limits. Meeting global nutrition needs while achieving sustainability is one of the greatest challenges for modern agric...

Low-temperature stress in late spring poses a serious threat to winter wheat production. In three-year environment-controlled phytotron experiments at both elongation and booting stages, we observed that short-term low-temperature stress decreased leaf area and stem, limited leaf photosynthetic system, and severely reduced grain yield, especially i...

Potatoes are a mainstay of human diets and 4 million metric tons are produced annually in the United States. Simulations of future crop production show that climate change is likely to reduce the yields of the major grain crops around the world, but the impacts on potato production have yet to be determined. A model ensemble consisting of five proc...

Fruit quality is of increasing importance for consumers but is a complex trait for growers, as it is affected by environment, genotype, and crop management interactions. Decision support tools, such as computer models that simulate crop growth and development can help optimize production but require further improvement to simulate quality aspects....

Wheat blast is a devastating fungal disease of wheat crops. The disease emerged in Brazil in the 1980s and is now spreading across continents, so it is urgent to calculate the potential for wheat blast spread and estimate the impact on wheat yield globally. By coupling a wheat crop simulation model with a new wheat blast model, quantitative estimat...

Current wheat crop management practices in the Nile Delta of Egypt are unsustainable due to the overuse of limited water resources. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate opportunities to maximize wheat yield and resource efficiency including irrigation water use efficiency (WUE), nitrogen use efficiency (NUE), and solar radiation use...

Supplementary infromation ad Senapati et al 2022 Nature Food

Global food security requires food production to be increased in the coming decades. The closure of any existing genetic yield gap (Yig) by genetic improvement could increase crop yield potential and global production. Here we estimated present global wheat Yig, covering all wheat-growing environments and major producers, by optimizing local wheat...

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...

Crop simulation models are robust tools that enable users to better understand crop growth and development in various agronomic systems for improved decision making regarding agricultural productivity, environmental sustainability, and breeding. Crop models can simulate many agronomic treatments across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, a...

Oilseed flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) is an important oil crop, and the SIMPLE model is a very effective tool to simulate crop production. In this study, to adapt the SIMPLE model for the overall improvement of flax production and yield, three promising cultivars of North China—Longya Hybrid No. 1, Baxuan No. 3 and Zhangya No. 2—were selected. Expe...

As crop yields are pushed closer to biophysical limits, achieving yield gains becomes increasingly challenging and will require more insight into deterministic pathways to yields. Here, we propose a wiring diagram as a platform to illustrate the interrelationships of the physiological traits that impact wheat yield potential and to serve as a decis...

Strawberry is a high-value horticultural crop with a global market and it has a strong regional importance in production areas such as Florida. Strawberry growers face many challenges related to weather, cultivation, and markets. Decision support tools can help optimize strawberry production but require sound models or other predictive tools as a f...

A recent trend in crop modeling has been the use of multi-model ensembles (MMEs) for impact assessment, especially as it relates to climate change. Studies have shown that, compared to individual models, the mean or median of a MME is a better predictor that is more accurate in making predictions and capable of providing model uncertainty informati...

Warming due to climate change has profound impacts on regional crop yields, and this includes impacts from rising mean growing season temperature and heat stress events. Adapting to these two impacts could be substantially different, and the overall contribution of these two factors on the effects of climate warming and crop yield is not known. Thi...

Food systems are increasingly challenged to meet growing demand for specialty crops due to the effects of climate change and increased competition for resources. Here, we apply an integrated methodology that includes climate, crop, economic and life cycle assessment models to US potato and tomato supply chains. We find that supply chains for two po...

Wheat production in Brazil is insufficient to meet domestic demand and falls drastically in response to adverse climate events. Multiple, agro-climate-specific regression models, quantifying regional production variability, were combined to estimate national production based on past climate, cropping area, trend-corrected yield, and national commod...

Calibration, the estimation of model parameters based on fitting the model to experimental data, is among the first steps in many applications of process-based models and has an important impact on simulated values. We propose a novel method of developing guidelines for calibration of process-based models, based on development of recommendations fo...

The vulnerability of wheat to climate change is accelerating at an increasing rate. This paper reviews the climate change trends, climate change impacts, quantification methods and adaption options in the arid and semi-arid environment. The temperature of mid-latitude of Asia may increase 2.4°C during the wheat season. Different studies reported th...

During the past decade, the interest in using crop models for research, education, extension, outreach and in the private sector has rapidly increased. The iCROPM 2020 Symposium entitled ‘Crop Modeling for the Future’, held in February 2020, therefore, provided a great opportunity for over 400 scientists from 50 different countries to exchange info...

The combination of advances in knowledge, technology, changes in consumer preference and low cost of manufacturing is accelerating the next technology revolution in crop, livestock and fish production systems. This will have major implications for how, where and by whom food will be produced in the future. This next technology revolution could bene...

Temperature response curves under diurnal oscillating temperatures differ from those under constant conditions for all stages of the Phytophthora infestans infection cycle on potatoes. We developed a mechanistic model (BLIGHTSIM) with an hourly time step to simulate late blight under fluctuating environmental conditions and predict late blight epid...

Cassava is an important crop in the developing world. The goal of this study was to review published cassava models (18) for their capability to simulate storage root biomass and to categorize them into static and dynamic models. The majority (14) are dynamic and capture within season growth dynamics. Most (13) of the dynamic models consider enviro...

Temperature affects many life processes, but its effect might be expected to differ among eukaryotic organisms inhabiting similar environments. We reviewed literature on temperature thresholds of humans, livestock, poultry, agricultural crops, and sparse examples of fisheries. We found that preferable and harmful temperatures are similar for humans...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.dib.2020.106639.].

Climate change affects global agricultural production and threatens food security. Faster phenological development of crops due to climate warming is one of the main drivers for potential future yield reductions. To counter the effect of faster maturity, adapted varieties would require more heat units to regain the previous growing period length. I...

Plant diseases are major causes of crop yield losses globally, yet their effects represent a poorly documented source of uncertainty in crop modelling. Ignoring the effects of plant diseases in crop models may lead to large overestimations of current and future crop production levels. Simulation modelling must be seen as a necessary instrument to u...

Wheat (Triticum aestivum) is the most widely grown food crop in the world threatened by future climate change. In this study, we simulated climate change impacts and adaptation strategies for wheat globally using new crop genetic traits (CGT), including increased heat tolerance, early vigor to increase early crop water use, late flowering to revers...

Accurately predicting crop development stage is key to simulating growth and yield formation in crop models. Low temperature stress is a major limitation to global wheat production and can significantly slow down wheat development rate. In a four-year environment-controlled phytotron experiments, detailed phenology datasets were obtained for low te...

Predicting wheat phenology is important for cultivar selection, for effective crop management and provides a baseline for evaluating the effects of global change. Evaluating how well crop phenology can be predicted is therefore of major interest. Twenty-eight wheat modeling groups participated in this evaluation. Our target population was wheat fie...

Predicting phenology is essential for adapting varieties to different environmental conditions and for crop management. Therefore, it is important to evaluate how well different crop modeling groups can predict phenology. Multiple evaluation studies have been previously published, but it is still difficult to generalize the findings from such studi...

Highlights CSM-NWheat, a DSSAT wheat crop model, was coupled with a pest module named PEST. The coupled model can simulate the impact of pest and disease damage on wheat crops. Pest damage is expressed in daily steps by communication links called coupling points. Coupling points are linked with state variables at which pest damage can be applied. F...

Plant responses to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, together with projected variations in temperature and precipitation will determine future agricultural production. Estimates of the impacts of climate change on agriculture provide essential information to design effective adaptation strategies, and develop sustainable food...

This article elaborates on the life cycle assessment (LCA) protocol designed for formulating the life cycle inventories (LCIs) of fruit and vegetable (F&V) supply chains. As a set of case studies, it presents the LCI data of the processed vegetable products, (a) potato: chips, frozen-fries, and dehydrated flakes, and (b) tomato-pasta sauce. The dat...

Responses of global crop yields to warmer temperatures are fundamental to sustainable development under climate change but remain uncertain. Here, we combined a global dataset of field warming experiments (48 sites) for wheat, maize, rice and soybean with gridded global crop models to produce field-data-constrained estimates on responses of crop yi...

Comparing outputs of multiple climate and crop models is an option to assess the uncertainty in simulations in a changing climate. The use of multiple wheat models under five plausible future simulated climatic conditions is rarely found in literature. CERES-Wheat, DSSAT-Nwheat, CROPSIM-Wheat, and APSIM-Wheat models were calibrated with observed da...

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...

Food systems are increasingly challenged to meet growing demand for specialty crops due to the effects of climate change and increased competition for resources. We apply a novel integrated methodology that includes climate, crop, economic, and life cycle assessment (LCA) models to US potato and tomato supply chains. We assess the effectiveness of...

Grain yield of wheat and its components are very sensitive to heat stress at the critical growth stages of anthesis and grain filling. We observed negative impacts of heat stress on biomass partitioning and grain growth in environment-controlled phytotron experiments over 4 years, and we quantified relationships between the stress and grain number...

Calibration, the estimation of model parameters based on fitting the model to experimental data, is among the first steps in essentially every application of crop models and process models in other fields and has an important impact on simulated values. The goal of this study is to develop a comprehensive list of the decisions involved in calibrati...

Temperature response curves under diurnal oscillating temperatures differ from those under constant conditions for all stages of the Phytophthora infestans infection cycle on potatoes. We developed a mechanistic model (BLIGHTSIM) with an hourly time step to simulate late blight under fluctuating environmental conditions and predict late blight epid...

Significance Wheat is the most important food crop worldwide, grown across millions of hectares. Wheat yields in the field are usually low and vary with weather, soil, and crop management practices. We show that yields for wheat grown in indoor vertical farms under optimized growing conditions would be several hundred times higher than yields in th...

Predicting wheat phenology is important for cultivar selection, for effective crop management and provides a baseline for evaluating the effects of global change. Evaluating how well crop phenology can be predicted is therefore of major interest. Twenty-eight wheat modeling groups participated in this evaluation. Our target population was wheat fie...

The dataset includes data from detailed field experiments across a temperature gradient at four locations along the River Nile. The data covering four contrasting environments from North (low temperature) to South (high temperature), includes Sakha (north delta, Lower Egypt), Menofya (middle delta), Beni Suef (Middle Egypt) and Aswan (Upper Egypt)....

Field data from six experiments covering a wide range of growing conditions were organized for tef growth and cropping systems modeling. The data included (i) an irrigation experiment in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, (ii) a cultivar trial at Fallon, NV, USA, (iii) a nitrogen fertilizer experiment in the Jamma District of Ethiopia, (iv) a nitrogen...

Background: Climate change, including higher temperatures (HT) has a detrimental impact on wheat productivity and modeling studies predict more frequent heat waves in the future. Wheat growth can be impaired by high daytime and nighttime temperature at any developmental stage, especially during the grain filling stage. Leaf chlorophyll content, le...

Predicting the consequences of manipulating genotype (G) and agronomic management (M) on agricultural ecosystem performances under future environmental (E) conditions remains a challenge. Crop modelling has the potential to enable society to assess the efficacy of G × M technologies to mitigate and adapt crop production systems to climate change. D...

We identified the most sensitive genotype-specific parameters (GSPs) and their contribution to the uncertainty of the MANIHOT simulation model. We applied a global sensitivity and uncertainty analysis (GSUA) of the GSPs to the simulation outputs for the cassava development, growth, and yield in contrasting environments. We compared enhanced Samplin...

Significance Impacts of global warming on agricultural productivity have been evaluated extensively. The implications of sudden cooling for global crop growth, however, are as yet little understood. While crop failures after historic volcanic eruptions are documented, a nuclear conflict can cause even more severe and longer-lasting climate anomalie...

Crop improvement efforts aiming at increasing crop production (quantity, quality) and adapting to climate change have been subject of active research over the past years. But, ‘to what extent can breeding gains be achieved under a changing climate, at a pace sufficient to usefully contribute to climate adaptation, mitigation and food security?’. He...

Global gridded climate–crop model ensembles are increasingly used to make projections of how climate change will affect future crop yield. However, the level of certainty that can be attributed to such simulations is unknown. Here, using currently available geospatial datasets and a widely employed simulation procedure, we created a wheat model ens...

Moderate heat stress accompanied by short episodes of extreme heat during the post-anthesis stage is common in most US wheat growing areas and causes substantial yield losses. Sink strength (grain number) is a key yield limiting factor in modern wheat varieties. Increasing spike fertility (SF) and improving the partitioning of assimilates can optim...

Tef is an Ethiopian staple grain that provides both food security and income for smallholders. As tef is nutritious and gluten free, it is also gaining popularity as a health food. A tef model was calibrated based on the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer’s (DSSAT) NWheat model and included parameter changes in phenology, photoperi...