“Paleoartists” attempt to hone their craft and captivate the public even as they grapple with emerging data that alter how we see dinosaurs.
Image credit: Mark Witton.
New Research In
Physical Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Biological Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Edited by Nils Chr. Stenseth, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, and approved December 17, 2019 (received for review April 19, 2019)
Significance
Increasing diversity within crops may be a powerful way to reduce agricultural declines from climate change. As such, it has garnered increasing attention, especially in documenting within-crop diversity through different cultivars or wild relatives. Yet, there are few tests of whether this diversity can mitigate losses with warming. Here, using European (predominantly French) databases to forecast winegrape phenology, we test if shifting cultivars changes predictions of future growing regions. We find that cultivar diversity halved potential losses of winegrowing regions under a 2 °C warming scenario and could reduce losses by a third if warming reaches 4 °C. Thus, diversity—if adopted by growers locally—can mitigate agricultural losses, but its effectiveness will depend on global decisions regarding future emissions.
Abstract
Agrobiodiversity—the variation within agricultural plants, animals, and practices—is often suggested as a way to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on crops [S. A. Wood et al., Trends Ecol. Evol. 30, 531–539 (2015)]. Recently, increasing research and attention has focused on exploiting the intraspecific genetic variation within a crop [Hajjar et al., Agric. Ecosyst. Environ. 123, 261–270 (2008)], despite few relevant tests of how this diversity modifies agricultural forecasts. Here, we quantify how intraspecific diversity, via cultivars, changes global projections of growing areas. We focus on a crop that spans diverse climates, has the necessary records, and is clearly impacted by climate change: winegrapes (predominantly Vitis vinifera subspecies vinifera). We draw on long-term French records to extrapolate globally for 11 cultivars (varieties) with high diversity in a key trait for climate change adaptation—phenology. We compared scenarios where growers shift to more climatically suitable cultivars as the climate warms or do not change cultivars. We find that cultivar diversity more than halved projected losses of current winegrowing areas under a 2 °C warming scenario, decreasing areas lost from 56 to 24%. These benefits are more muted at higher warming scenarios, reducing areas lost by a third at 4 °C (85% versus 58%). Our results support the potential of in situ shifting of cultivars to adapt agriculture to climate change—including in major winegrowing regions—as long as efforts to avoid higher warming scenarios are successful.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: ignacio.moralesc{at}uah.es.
Author contributions: I.M.-C., I.G.d.C.-A., B.I.C., T.L., A.P., C.v.L., K.A.N., and E.M.W. designed research; I.M.-C. and E.M.W. performed research; I.M.-C., I.G.d.C.-A., and E.M.W. analyzed data; I.M.-C. and E.M.W. wrote the paper; I.M.-C., I.G.d.C.-A., B.I.C., T.L., A.P., C.v.L., K.A.N., and E.M.W. contributed ideas; I.M.-C., I.G.d.C.-A., B.I.C., T.L., A.P., C.v.L., K.A.N., and E.M.W. edited the manuscript; I.M.-C. designed and produced the figures; I.G.d.C.-A., B.I.C., and A.P. contributed to the writing of supporting information; and A.P. built the database.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: Analyses other than phenological parameterization and cross-validation utilized custom computer R code, freely available at GitHub, https://github.com/MoralesCastilla/PhenoDiversity.
This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1906731117/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
Log in using your username and password
Purchase access
You may purchase access to this article. This will require you to create an account if you don't already have one.
Diversity buffers winegrowing regions from climate change losses
Sign up for Article Alerts
Article Classifications
- Biological Sciences
- Sustainability Science
Jump to section
You May Also be Interested in
Coral reef bleaching frequently makes headlines, but researchers are still trying to sort out the cellular mechanisms at work.
Image credit: The Ocean Agency/XL Catlin Seaview Survey.
Greenhouse gas emissions in the first decades of the 21st century are likely to affect global sea level for centuries, and limiting long-term sea-level rise might require stringent near-term emission reductions.
Image courtesy of Lucy Reading-Ikkanda (artist).
A single formulation combining two gene therapies treated an array of age-related disorders in mice.
Image courtesy of Pixabay/Sipa.
Many ecosystems in the United States may be vulnerable to increased fire occurrence and frequency caused by invasive grasses.
Image courtesy of Pixabay/Stevepb.