Meta-analysis of ridge-furrow cultivation effects on maize production and water use efficiency
Introduction
Dryland crop production remains the primary source of staple food for the majority of densely-populated regions such as China, sub-Saharan Africa and India (Daryanto et al., 2017). Water supply constraints are recognized as major factors affecting dryland crop production (Wang et al., 2018a), thus dryland crop production is a continuous exercise to allocate the limited rain-water supply to meet the total water consumption during crop growing stage (ET). Therefore, the development of methods to improve agricultural productivity and water use efficiency (WUE) in regions with limited water resources remains crucial (Wu et al., 2015).
By increasing soil water availability and yield, ridge-furrow cultivation (RF) has been widely used in dryland maize cultivation in northwest China since the 1980s (Li et al., 2007; Ren et al., 2008). In the past forty years, many field experiments have been conducted to examine the effects of RF on maize production in China, but the reported effects of RF on maize yield, ET and WUE varied greatly due to different climate, soil factors, and mulching management practices.
There are many studies showing different extents of yield increase in different climatic gradients across China. A study showed RF increased yield, water and precipitation productivity in maize as compared with flat-plot cultivation (FP) under a typical sub-humid drought-prone climate (Yin et al., 2018). An increase in maize yield and water productivity was found under RF in semiarid regions of China (Jia et al., 2018a, b). The RF and plastic-mulching technique provides a potential opportunity of substantially increasing crop yields in semiarid regions of China, but this technology brings about a challenge in maintaining soil fertility (Zhou et al., 2012). Wang et al. (2018b) also demonstrated that RF with plastic mulching is an effective drought-resistant farming technology, which has been widely used in the semiarid regions of China, and increased crop yields by more than 30 %. One study reported that the RF was combined with irrigation to increase the crop water use efficiency in a semi-humid climate (Wu et al., 2015). The yield and WUE were significantly higher under RF with low fertilizer as compared with high fertilizer and medium fertilizer in wet year. However, in both normal and drought years, the grain yield and WUE were significantly higher under RF with medium fertilizer (Zhang et al., 2018). Another study showed that a significant increase range was observed under the average grain yields in the RF with plastic mulch and high irrigation amount, RF with plastic mulch- and low irrigation amount and RF with high irrigation amount treatments between two years with different precipitation amount (Dong et al., 2018a). These studies indicated that there were various effects of RF on the yield and WUE in different regions resulted from different temperature, precipitation and soil conditions.
Variability in results were also found among different mulching management practices. In southeast Kenya, the grain yield and WUE in RF with plastic mulch treatments were increased as compared with RF without plastic film (Mo et al., 2016). In addition, Liu et al. (2014a) showed that RF with plastic mulch could sustain high grain yields in maize and maintain soil water balance under semiarid environment. The RF with plastic mulch increased grain yield and WUE as compared to no mulch (Li et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2014b). A different increase range in the maize yields was found among RF with mulched with plastic film, biodegradable film, maize straw (Li et al., 2013). However, where the RF with plastic mulch has been applied in successive years, the annual balance of soil water has been affected and the risk of soil desiccation exacerbated (Wang et al., 2018b), and white pollution. Overall, the effects RF on the yield and WUE varied with mulching management practices.
The impacts of RF on the yield, ET, and WUE in maize mainly depend on several co-varying factors (i.e., agroclimatic regions, soil texture, and mulching management). A meta-analysis showed that soil mulching significantly enhances yields as well as water- and nitrogen-use efficiency of maize and wheat (Qin et al., 2015). Yu et al. (2018) documented benefits and limitations to straw- and plastic-film mulch on maize yield and WUE using a meta-analysis across hydrothermal gradients. By covering the ridges with plastic and channeling rainwater into a very narrow planting zone (furrow), a meta-analysis showed that plastic mulching resulted in a yield increase (Daryanto et al., 2017).
However, the effects of RF on the yield, ET, and WUE of maize have not been quantified across a range of agroecological conditions which incorporate different environmental and management factors. As site-specific field experiments often vary, meta-analysis is useful for summarizing the results from numerous independent experiments on RF (Hedges et al., 1999). Therefore, the main objectives of this study were to conduct a meta-analysis to (1) evaluate the effects of RF on the yield, ET, and WUE of maize, and (2) determine how the effects vary with environmental and mulching management factors.
Section snippets
Database
We searched for articles reporting the impact of RF on maize production and WUE in the arid and semiarid rain-fed areas of China using Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure. The search only included combinations of the following terms: (i) ridge-furrow, maize, yield, and water use efficiency or (ii) ridge and furrow, corn, yield, and WUE.
We systematically reviewed all results published before February 2019. The articles were included in the database only if they met the
Results
Averaged across a wide range of environmental and management conditions, RF increased maize yield and WUE by 47 % and 39 %, respectively. RF, however, did not impact ET (Fig. 3). The lnR of WUE was significantly and positively related with yield (P < 0.0001). There was a significant (P < 0.05) negative relationship between the lnR of WUE and ET (Table 2), indicating that the increase in WUE under RF was related to the increase in yield and decrease in ET.
Climate impact
Our meta-analysis showed the effects of RF on yield, ET and WUE varied with climate (i.e., temperature and precipitation). RF significantly increased soil topsoil temperature during early spring, resulting in the promotion of plant growth (Li et al., 2013). Early spring is usually characterized by freezing soil temperature and therefore increasing soil temperature contributes to greater yield under RF. Our results, however, showed that the impacts of RF were positive to yield and WUE regardless
Conclusions
Our results showed that RF had no effects on ET, but significantly increased WUE by 39 %, which contributed to a 47 % increase in maize yield. RF, a practice that is indigenous to China and India and now spreading around the world, is an important and innovative water-saving tool for increasing crop yields and securing food supply in arid and semiarid regions. However, such increase occurs at the expense of a large amount of soil water and fertilizer. Because the responses of maize yield, ET,
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their constructive comments on this manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge financial support for this research from the projects funded by the Shaanxi Natural Science Basic Research Program (2019JQ-642), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M643749), and the Doctoral Scientific Research Foundation of Northwest A&F University (Z109021711).
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