Effects of climate change on agricultural water resource carrying capacity in a high-latitude basin

Abstract

Abstract The agricultural water resource carrying capacity (AWRCC) is affected by climate change now as never before. However, it is still unclear how the AWRCC in high latitudes responses to climate change. In this study, spatiotemporal changes in climatic factors and AWRCC during the crop growing season from 1961 to 2014 in the Nenjiang River Basin (NRB), a high-latitude basin in China, were identified via multivariate statistical analysis. Meanwhile, the impact of climatic factors on AWRCC was analyzed by using cross-wavelet approaches and Pearson correlational analysis. The results showed that temperature has followed an increasing trend, especially the lowest temperature during crop growing season , with a trend of 0.57℃/10a in the local region. There was no obvious change trend for precipitation, but the interannual change was large. The drought index increased first and then decreased, which was consistent with the trend of the ET0. Different spatial distributions of water resource carrying for all crops in a region were shown with a variation range of 0.22–0.76 kg/m2 in the NRB. It is worth noting that AWRCC showed an increasing trend, especially in the past decade. Precipitation, ET0, and meteorological drought were all key driving factors affecting AWRCC. The correlation was significant between the crop planting proportion and AWRCC under climate change. Moreover, adjusting the planting proportion of wheat, soybean and rice, and increasing that of maize, would be conducive to improving the AWRCC and facilitating the synergistic development of agriculture and wetlands in NRB.