Two centuries of April-July temperature change in southeastern China and its influence on grain productivity

• Published in: Science bulletin (Beijing) 2017-01, Vol.62 (1), p.40-45
• Main Authors: Shi, Jiangfeng, Li, Jinbao, Zhang, David D., Zheng, Jingyun, Shi, Shiyuan, Ge, Quansheng, Lee, Harry F., Zhao, Yesi, Zhang, Jie, Lu, Huayu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: China; Grain productivity; Social disturbance; Temperature; Tree-rings; 中国东南部; 中国东部; 传统农业; 作物生产; 气候变化影响; 温度变化; 粮食产量; 粮食生产
• ISSN: 2095-9273
• DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2016.11.005

China is a traditional agriculture based country and one main region for crop production is southeastern China where temperature is a dominant climate variable affecting agriculture. Temperature and social disturbances both influence crop production, yet distinguishing their relative impacts is difficult due to a lack of reliable, high-resolution historical climatic records before the very recent period. Here we pre- sent the first tree-ring based warm-season temperature reconstruction for southeastern China, a core region of the East Asian monsoon, for the past 227 years. The reconstruction target was April-July mean temperature, and our model explained 60.6% of the observed temperature variance during 1953-2012. Spatial correlation analysis showed that the reconstruction is representative of April-July temperature change over most of eastern China. The reconstructed temperature series agrees well with China-scale （heavily weighted in eastern China） agricultural production index values quite well at decadal timescales. The impacts of social upheavals on food production, such as those in the period 1920-1949, were con- firmed after climatic influences were excluded. Our study should help distinguish the influence of social disturbance and warm-season temperature on grain productivity in the core agricultural region of China during the past two centuries.