Intraspecific Responses of Plant Productivity and Crop Yield to Experimental Warming: A Global Synthesis

Abstract

Maintaining plant productivity and crop yield in a warming world requires local adaptation to new environment and selection of high-yield cultivars, both depends on intraspecific differences in the plant response to warming (referred to as “intraspecific responses”). However, how the intraspecific responses mediate warming effects on plants remains unclear, especially at the global scale. Here a meta-analysis was performed with 118 common-garden experiments to examine the importance of intraspecific responses of plant growth, productivity, and crop yield. Our results showed that the intraspecific responses accounted for 34.7% of the total variance in the warming responses across all the studies. The intraspecific responses of plant productivity and crop yield were larger than those of organ level traits and biomass allocation, suggesting that plant growth was mainly achieved by iterating the terminal modules rather than reshaping the organ level traits. Moreover, larger intraspecific responses could reduce the consistence of relative performance between control and warming treatments for both plant productivity and crop yield. These results highlighted the unneglectable role of intraspecific responses in plant responses to warming, implying that the evolutionary history within species should be incorporated into current ecosystem models to obtain more accurate predictions on ecosystem function under climate change.

Keywords: cultivar selection, Global warming, intraspecific responses, organ level traits, plant productivity, population genetic structure