Abstract
Increases in global mean temperature since 1960 are largely attributed to the rise in minimum nighttime temperatures thereby decreasing diurnal temperature variation. Increased night temperatures are known to affect crop development. A multi-year study investigating the effects of increased night temperatures on soft red winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) varieties was conducted during the 2015-2016 growing seasons at the University of Kentucky Spindletop Research Farm in Lexington, KY. Thirty-six cultivars and breeding lines were chosen based on their genotypes at photoperiod and vernalization loci. This material was planted in a randomized complete block experiment with two replications and two environments, control and passively warmed. To create a passively warmed environment, thermal covers were mounted to frames in plots and connected to a datalogger programmed to cover plants from dusk to dawn based on coordinate location. Night temperature increases ranged from 0.27–0.75 °C above ambient temperature. Grain yield, averaged across genotypes, was significantly reduced in the passively warmed environment by 224 kg ha−1 (p ≤ 0.05) or 6.44%; however, yield response to environment varied among genotypes with several genotypes displaying an increased yield in the warmed environment. Yield reductions may reflect reduced nitrogen utilization (9.4%; p ≤ 0.001) under increased night temperatures.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-8-2020
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy10040531
Funding Information
This work was funded in part by a grant from USDA-NIFA-AFRI Triticeae Coordinated Agricultural Project, 2011-68002-30029, and a grant from the Kentucky Small Grain Promotion Council.
Related Content
Supplementary materials are available online at http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/10/4/531/s1.
Supplementary materials are also available as the additional file listed at the end of this record.
Repository Citation
Russell, Kathleen and Van Sanford, David A., "Breeding Wheat for Resilience to Increasing Nighttime Temperatures" (2020). Plant and Soil Sciences Faculty Publications. 145.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/pss_facpub/145
Supplementary Materials
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Agronomy, v. 10, issue 4, 531, p. 1-12.
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).