PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Global food security: Climate change adaptation requires new cultivars

2021-05-18
(Press-News.org) Climate change induced yield reductions can be compensated by cultivar adaptation and global production can even be increased.

Global agriculture both is one of the major drivers of climate change and strongly affected by it. Rising temperatures are among the main reasons for yield reductions. Therefore, the agricultural sector is faced with the major challenge of adapting to climate change in order to ensure food security in the future. According to a new study carried out by international researchers, the use of locally adapted cultivars can significantly contribute to achieve this goal. The study was led by LMU geographer Dr. Florian Zabel.

For four different climate scenarios, he and his colleagues simulated the impacts of climate change on the global production of maize, rice, soy and wheat and investigated how locally adapted cultivars would affect crop yields. Thereby, the scenarios represent different socio-economic pathways that result in temperature increases ranging between 1.4 and 3.9°C in global average.

"Our results show that, at least under moderate warming, we could generally adapt well to climate change and even increase global yields by almost 20% until the end of the century. Thereby, the increase of atmospheric CO2 partly attributes to the yield increase for some crops, due to positive effects on the efficiency of photosynthesis." says Zabel.

Strong warming threatens adaptation

If global warming can be restricted to below 1.5°C, as specified in the Paris Agreements, the simulations suggest that 85% of the global cropland area can be optimally cultivated with already available cultivars.

The stronger the warming, the more new cultivars will be needed and the higher the risk that a required locally adapted cultivars that can cope with the changed local conditions will not be available.

"In the worst-case scenario, almost 40% of global cropland could require new cultivars, of which some would need to have traits that currently do not exist," says Zabel. Thereby, a critical point is that this even affects globally important production regions, such as North America's Corn Belt, the world's most important region for maize production.

"In addition, there are some regions where cultivar adaptation will not be possible, for instance due to a change in future precipitation and possible droughts," says Zabel. The simulations consider local and regional effects of climate change, and therefore allow identifying regions where locally adapted cultivars could be particularly beneficial for yields. These include large areas of Europe, China and Russia. However, in other parts of the world - including Turkey, Northeastern Brazil, Texas, Kenya and parts of India - adapted cultivars are predicted to have little or no effect on yields, due to a reduction of available water for crops.

Innovative and more efficient breeding methods offer a possible solution. "Conventional breeding approaches often take years," Zabel points out. "New methods such as CRISPR-Cas could help to develop required cultivars that are specifically adapted to local conditions more quickly and in a more targeted way," Zabel adds.

INFORMATION:

The study appears in the journal Global Change Biology. In addition to the authors based at LMU, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, at Columbia University in the City of New York (USA), the University of Chicago (USA), the Université de Liège (Belgium), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria), China Agricultural University in Beijing, the University of Birmingham (UK) and Lund University (Sweden).



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

New research will allow convenient investigation of human innate immune response to viral infections

2021-05-18
(Boston)--Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) report the formation of human cells containing a green fluorescent protein or GFP (one of the most important proteins in biology and fluorescence imaging) genetically fused with two interferon stimulated genes (ISGs), namely Viperin and ISG15. This new creation makes these cells highly valuable reagents for reporting innate immune responses to viral infections, including those caused by coronaviruses. These engineered cells, which turn green when treated with interferon, are highly novel because this is the first time a reporter gene (a gene ...

Nanofiber filter captures almost 100% of coronavirus aerosols

Nanofiber filter captures almost 100% of coronavirus aerosols
2021-05-18
A filter made from polymer nanothreads blew three kinds of commercial masks out of the water by capturing 99.9% of coronavirus aerosols in an experiment. "Our work is the first study to use coronavirus aerosols for evaluating filtration efficiency of face masks and air filters," said corresponding author Yun Shen, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering. "Previous studies have used surrogates of saline solution, polystyrene beads, and bacteriophages -- a group of viruses that infect bacteria." The study, led by engineers at UC Riverside and The George Washington University, compared ...

New peanut has a wild past and domesticated present

New peanut has a wild past and domesticated present
2021-05-18
The wild relatives of modern peanut plants have the ability to withstand disease in ways that peanut plants can't. The genetic diversity of these wild relatives means that they can shrug off the diseases that kill farmers' peanut crops, but they also produce tiny nuts that are difficult to harvest because they burrow deep in the soil. Consider it a genetic trade-off: During its evolution, the modern peanut lost its genetic diversity and much of the ability to fight off fungus and viruses, but gained qualities that make peanut so affordable, sustainable and tasty that people all over the world grow and eat them. Modern peanut plants were created 5,000 to ...

AI predicts lung cancer risk

AI predicts lung cancer risk
2021-05-18
OAK BROOK, Ill. - An artificial intelligence (AI) program accurately predicts the risk that lung nodules detected on screening CT will become cancerous, according to a study published in the journal Radiology. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with an estimated 1.8 million deaths in 2020, according to the World Health Organization. Low-dose chest CT is used to screen people at a high risk of lung cancer, such as longtime smokers. It has been shown to significantly reduce lung cancer mortality, primarily by helping to detect cancers at an early stage when they are easier to treat successfully. While lung cancer typically shows up as pulmonary nodules on CT images, most nodules are benign ...

Towards a universal flu vaccine for Indigenous populations

2021-05-18
Researchers have identified specific influenza targets that could be used to better protect Indigenous people from experiencing severe influenza disease through a universal, T cell-based vaccine. In a collaboration with Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Menzies School of Health Research and CQUniversity, Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) researchers took a deep-dive look into how the immune system can protect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from severe influenza disease. "We know that some populations are at high risk from severe influenza, and these include Indigenous people ...

Swiss farmers contributed to the domestication of the opium poppy

Swiss farmers contributed to the domestication of the opium poppy
2021-05-18
Fields of opium poppies once bloomed where the Zurich Opera House underground garage now stands. Through a new analysis of archaeological seeds, researchers at the University of Basel have been able to bolster the hypothesis that prehistoric farmers throughout the Alps participated in domesticating the opium poppy. Although known today primarily as the source of opium and opiates, the poppy is also a valuable food and medicinal plant. Its seeds can be used to make porridge and cooking oil. Unlike all other previously domesticated crops, which are assumed to ...

Researchers first achieve quantum information masking experimentally

2021-05-18
The research team, led by Academician GUO Guangcan from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, collaborating with LI Bo from Shangrao Normal University and CHEN Jingling from Nankai University, achieved the masking of optical quantum information. The researchers concealed quantum information into non-local quantum entangled states. The study was published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Quantum information masking as one of the new information processing protocol transfers quantum information from a single quantum carrier to the quantum entangled state between multiple carriers avoiding the information ...

Colonization of the Antilles by South American fauna: Giant sunken islands as a passageway

Colonization of the Antilles by South American fauna: Giant sunken islands as a passageway
2021-05-18
Fossils of land animals from South America have been found in the Antilles, but how did these animals get there? According to scientists from the CNRS, l'Université des Antilles, l'Université de Montpellier and d'Université Côte d'Azur, land emerged in this region and then disappeared beneath the waves for millions of years, explaining how some species were able to migrate to the Antilles. This study will be published in June 2021 issue in Earth-Science Reviews. Fossils of land animals from the Antilles, including mammals and amphibians, have their closest relatives in South America. The crossing of the Caribbean Sea from South America was therefore possible, but how? As swimming across the continent ...

Megaprojects threaten water justice for local communities

Megaprojects threaten water justice for local communities
2021-05-18
Urban megaprojects tend to be the antithesis of good urban planning. They have a negative impact on local water systems, deprive local communities of water-related human rights, and their funders and sponsors have little accountability for their impact. These are the findings of the University of Adelaide's Dr Scott Hawken from the School of Architecture and Built Environment who led a review of the impact of urban megaprojects on water justice in South East Asia. "Urban megaprojects have severe implications for environmental processes," said Dr Hawken. "They have a major impact on hydrological systems and during all phases of development affect water security and human ...

LHAASO discovers a dozen PeVatrons and photons exceeding 1 PeV and launches ultra-high-energy gamma

LHAASO discovers a dozen PeVatrons and photons exceeding 1 PeV and launches ultra-high-energy gamma
2021-05-18
China's Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO)--one of the country's key national science and technology infrastructure facilities--has found a dozen ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic accelerators within the Milky Way. It has also detected photons with energies exceeding 1 peta-electron-volt (quadrillion electron-volts or PeV), including one at 1.4 PeV. The latter is the highest energy photon ever observed. These findings overturn the traditional understanding of the Milky Way and open up an era of UHE gamma astronomy. These observations will prompt people to rethink the mechanism by which high-energy particles are generated and propagated in the Milky Way, and will encourage people to explore more deeply violent celestial phenomena and their physical processes ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Call for papers: 14th Asia-Pacific Conference on Transportation and the Environment (APTE 2025)

A novel disturbance rejection optimal guidance method for enhancing precision landing performance of reusable rockets

New scan method unveils lung function secrets

Searching for hidden medieval stories from the island of the Sagas

Breakthrough study reveals bumetanide treatment restores early social communication in fragile X syndrome mouse model

Neuroscience leader reveals oxytocin's crucial role beyond the 'love hormone' label

Twelve questions to ask your doctor for better brain health in the new year

Microelectronics Science Research Centers to lead charge on next-generation designs and prototypes

Study identifies genetic cause for yellow nail syndrome

New drug to prevent migraine may start working right away

Good news for people with MS: COVID-19 infection not tied to worsening symptoms

Department of Energy announces $179 million for Microelectronics Science Research Centers

Human-related activities continue to threaten global climate and productivity

Public shows greater acceptance of RSV vaccine as vaccine hesitancy appears to have plateaued

Unraveling the power and influence of language

Gene editing tool reduces Alzheimer’s plaque precursor in mice

TNF inhibitors prevent complications in kids with Crohn's disease, recommended as first-line therapies

Twisted Edison: Bright, elliptically polarized incandescent light

Structural cell protein also directly regulates gene transcription

Breaking boundaries: Researchers isolate quantum coherence in classical light systems

Brain map clarifies neuronal connectivity behind motor function

Researchers find compromised indoor air in homes following Marshall Fire

Months after Colorado's Marshall Fire, residents of surviving homes reported health symptoms, poor air quality

Identification of chemical constituents and blood-absorbed components of Shenqi Fuzheng extract based on UPLC-triple-TOF/MS technology

'Glass fences' hinder Japanese female faculty in international research, study finds

Vector winds forecast by numerical weather prediction models still in need of optimization

New research identifies key cellular mechanism driving Alzheimer’s disease

Trends in buprenorphine dispensing among adolescents and young adults in the US

Emergency department physicians vary widely in their likelihood of hospitalizing a patient, even within the same facility

Firearm and motor vehicle pediatric deaths— intersections of age, sex, race, and ethnicity

[Press-News.org] Global food security: Climate change adaptation requires new cultivars