Effect of climate change-induced water-deficit stress on long-term rice yield

The water requirements of crops should be investigated to improve the efficiency of water use in irrigated agriculture. The main objective of the study was to assess the effects of water deficit stress on rice yields throughout the major cropping seasons. We analyzed rice yield data from field experiments in Taiwan over the period 1925–2019 to evaluate the effects of water-deficit stress on the yield of 12 rice cultivars. Weather data, including air temperatures, humidity, wind speed, sunshine duration, and rainfall were used to compute the temporal trends of reference evapotranspiration and crop water status (CWS) during rice growth stages. A negative CWS value indicates that the crop is water deficient, and a smaller value represents a lower water level (greater water-deficit stress) in crop growth. The CWS on rice growth under the initial, crop development, reproductive, and maturity stages declined by 96.9, 58.9, 24.7, and 198.6 mm in the cool cropping season and declined by 63.7, 18.1, 8.6, and 3.8 mm in the warm cropping season during the 95 years. The decreasing trends in the CWSs were used to represent the increases in water-deficit stress. The total yield change related to water-deficit stress on the cultivars from 1925–1944, 1945–1983, and 1996–2019 under the initial, crop development, reproductive, and maturity stages are -56.1 to 37.0, -77.5 to -12.3, 11.2 to 19.8, and -146.4 to 39.1 kg ha(-1) in the cool cropping season and -16.5 to 8.2, -12.9 to 8.1, -2.3 to 9.0, and -9.3 to 8.0 in the warm cropping season, respectively. Our results suggest that CWS may be a determining factor for rice to thrive during the developmental stage, but not the reproductive stage. In addition, the effect of water-deficit stress has increasingly affected the growth of rice in recent years.