Warmer Winters Keep Crops Sleepy into Spring, Hurting Yield

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https://eos.org/articles/warmer-winters-keep-crops-sleepy-into-spring-hurting-yield

By Elise Cutts, Eos/AGU. 

Excerpt: Annual crops need frosty periods to break out of their winter dormancy, reveal results published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Researchers grew winter oilseed rape, or canola, in temperature-controlled chambers and farm plots and found that the plant goes through a hibernation-like state that “breaks” only if the plants are sufficiently chilled. The new results highlight how climate change can shake up the finely tuned feedback systems linking life and the environment. ...“One of the main footprints of climate change is…the timing of biological events, like flowering in this case,” said ecologist Johanna Schmitt of the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the new research. Such events are “a big deal for ecosystems, the fitness of plant populations, and in this case for crop yields.”… 

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