Olive yield response to irrigation under climate change scenarios

Trabajo presentado en el IX International Symposium On Irrigation Of Horticultural Crops, celebrado en Matera (Italia) del 17 al 20 de junio de 2019.

Climate change is deemed as a major threat for the sustainability of current agricultural systems. The variety and complexity of ecophysiological responses induced by future climatic scenarios and the tremendous challenge of reproducing those in the field for representative plots and long periods make crop models an appropriate tool to foresee the outcomes of climate change for agriculture. This study assesses the impact of future climatic conditions on the productivity of olive orchards under different regimes of water supply using the process-based model OliveCan. ‘Future scenarios’ were generated from present weather datasets by increasing temperature by 2 ºC and decreasing rainfall by 20 %, considering a CO2 concentration to 540 ppm, which correspond to predictions by RCP4.5 for the end of the century in many of the Mediterranean areas where olive trees are massively cultivated. According to the model, the increase in atmospheric CO2 leads to a higher water use efficiency that compensate the negative effects of the temperature increase and rainfall reduction in many cases. Hence, our simulations reveal that future climatic scenarios can lead to either lower, neutral or higher productivities in relation to the present depending on the balance of water supply (rainfall + irrigation) and evaporative demand of the orchard.

Peer reviewed