ArticleNature communications2021
Global irrigation contribution to wheat and maize yield.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed.
- Coupling irrigation technology upgrades with targeted expansion enables water-efficient and climate-resilient cereal production in China.Nature food · 2026Article
- Refined crop modelling reveals intensifying impacts of droughts and heatwaves on global wheat productivity.Nature food · 2026Article
- Human imprints on global riverfronts.Nature communications · 2026Article
- A hybrid Granger TCN framework for generating climate analogues and determining the future of agricultural practices.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Sustainable global irrigation expansion could support only two-thirds of croplands under 1.5 °C and 3 °C warming.Nature food · 2026Article
- Global record-shattering breadbasket droughts emerge from moderately extreme regional events.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Optimizing agricultural irrigation as virtual energy storage to match renewable power profiles unlocks climate benefits during the energy transition.Nature food · 2026Article
- Extreme Dry-Heat Climate Impacts on Greenhouse Gas Emission Intensity in Wheat Production: Insights and Mitigation Strategies.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Soil health contributes to variations in crop production and nitrogen use efficiency.Nature food · 2025Article
- Socio-economic factors constrain climate change adaptation in a tropical export crop.Nature food · 2025Article
- Integrated irrigation and nitrogen optimization is a resource-efficient adaptation strategy for US maize and soybean production.Nature food · 2025Article
- Marker-Assisted Backcross Breeding of Drought-Tolerant Maize Lines Transformed by Vacuolar HPlants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Acclimation of functional traits leads to biomass increases in leafy green species grown in aquaponics.AoB PLANTS · 2025Article
- Improving future agricultural sustainability by optimizing crop distributions in China.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Assessment of potential habitat suitability for kiwifruit (Frontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- Optimizing Irrigation Strategies to Improve Yield and Water Use Efficiency of Drip-Irrigated Maize in Southern Xinjiang.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Climate adaptation through crop migration requires a nexus perspective for environmental sustainability in the North China Plain.Nature food · 2024Article
- Article
- Correlating grain yield with irrigation in a spatio-temporal context on the North China Plain.Heliyon · 2024Article
- A combined model of shoot phosphorus uptake based on sparse data and active learning algorithm.Frontiers in plant science · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
22 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Irrigation is the largest sector of human water use and an important option for increasing crop production and reducing drought impacts. However, the potential for irrigation to contribute to global crop yields remains uncertain. Here, we quantify this contribution for wheat and maize at global scale by developing a Bayesian framework integrating empirical estimates and gridded global crop models on new maps of the relative difference between attainable rainfed and irrigated yield (ΔY). At global scale, ΔY is 34 ± 9% for wheat and 22 ± 13% for maize, with large spatial differences driven more by patterns of precipitation than that of evaporative demand. Comparing irrigation demands with renewable water supply, we find 30-47% of contemporary rainfed agriculture of wheat and maize cannot achieve yield gap closure utilizing current river discharge, unless more water diversion projects are set in place, putting into question the potential of irrigation to mitigate climate change impacts.
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