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Abstract

Ozone pollution can severely diminish crop yields. Its damaging effects depend, apart from ozone concentration, on crop, cultivar, water status, temperature and CO2 concentration. Previous studies estimating global yield loss from ozone pollution did not consider all of these co-factors and climate change impact studies on crop yields typically ignore ozone pollution. Here we introduce an ozone damage module for the widely used process-based crop model LPJmL. The implementation describes ozone uptake through stomata, internal detoxification and short- and long-term effects on productivity and phenology, dynamically accounting for all listed co-factors. Using this enhanced model we estimate historical global yield losses from ozone pollution for wheat and soybeans. We divide wheat into “Western” and “Asian” to account for higher ozone sensitivities in Asian types. We apply daily ozone concentrations obtained from six chemistry-transport models provided by the ACCMIP and HTAP2 projects.

Our implementation of ozone damage follows expected dynamics, for example damage amplification under irrigation. The model is able to reproduce results from chamber and field studies. Historical ozone-induced losses between 2008 and 2010 vary between countries, and we estimate these between 2 and 10% of ozone-free yields for soybeans, between 0 and 27% for Western wheat and 4 and 39% for Asian wheat.

Our study highlights the threat of ozone pollution for global crop production and improves over previous studies by considering co-factors of ozone damage. Uncertainties of our study include the extrapolation from rather few point observations to the globe, possible biases in ozone data, omission of sub-daily fluctuations in ozone concentration or stomatal conductance and the averaging of different cultivars across regions. We suggest performing further field-scale experimental studies of ozone effects on crops, as these are currently rare but would be particularly helpful to evaluate models and to estimate large-scale effects of ozone.