Thematic Editors: Koki Homma, Toshihiro Hasegawa and Tsutomu Ishimaru
Need for accurately predicting the impacts of climate change is rapidly growing. However, there is a dearth of high-quality experimental data that enable us to examine the effects of climate change on yield and quality of crops. The special issue introduces eight papers reporting invaluable data to improve our understandings on the response of crops to changing climate and variability. Seven out of eight articles in this issue present the results from free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) conducted in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Maphosa et al. (2019) and Sakai et al. (2019) find genetic variability of the response to elevated CO2 concentrations for wheat and rice, respectively. Lieffering et al. (2019) suggest that responses to elevated CO2 depend on the direction that a slope faces in non-flat grasslands. Kobayasi et al. (2019a, 2019b) examine the effects of elevated CO2 on traits-related to heat-induced sterility. Ikawa et al. (2019) and Migyagi (2019) present significant differences in leaf-level physiology between two contrasting rice cultivars examined in the FACE experiments. Nguyen et al. (2019) analyse long-term rice yield trials and detect seasonally different effects of rising temperatures on yield components. These results will be an important basis for improving our quantitative understandings of the impacts of climate change on the cropping systems.
