Crop response to climate change: SPAR facilities, capabilities and tools

Environmental stress factors have far‐reaching implications on global food security and significantly impact crop production through their effects on soil fertility, carbon sequestration, plant growth, and productivity.  Several approaches have been used to assess the effects of environmental stress factors on crops and to evaluate possible solutions. One such approach is the use of crop simulation models to explore the impact of climate stresses on crop plants will be discussed in this presentation, to provide a more accurate understanding of climate change effects on agriculture in the coming decades. Crop models, based on appropriate concepts and processes, have the predictive capability under new environments and can be used either alone or with other emerging newer technologies to disseminate plant growth and development information. Crop models such as GOSSYM, a cotton simulation model was used to evaluate crop responses to factors such as weather, irrigation, and fertilization by simulating the growth and production of crops from planting to harvest. The presentation also discusses the SPAR (Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Research) system to generate data required to understand various facets of growth and developmental processes and to build process-level models for managing the cotton crop to abiotic stresses. The SPAR units are optimized for the measurement of a plant and canopy-level physiological responses such as photosynthesis and transpiration under precisely controlled, but naturally lit, environmental conditions and to relate the basic processes directly to the environment. Various validation efforts of the GOSSYM cotton simulation model and its uses in multiple applications such as climate change impacts, technology transfer, hypothesis testing in research, farm management, and policymaking decisions will be discussed.