Investigating the Ecological Drivers of Agricultural Yield in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes

Abstract

Climate change threatens the future of food and water security across the globe. In the tropical Andes, where there is still high uncertainty around how shifting environmental conditions will affect the crop yields, climate change is expected to inequitably hurt already vulnerable small-scale farmers. In this study, we aim to quantify the sensitivity of the annual yield of key crops to changing climatic conditions across different elevation ranges in Ecuador and Peru. To do this, we spatially aggregated monthly-average soil moisture, maximum temperature, and SIF observations of croplands with the reported national annual yields from 2007-2018. We then ran linear regressions to model the relationship between crop yield and these ecological parameters. Our findings show that the variability in Peruvian, high elevation crop yields is attributable to the variations in soil moisture, temperature, and SIF observations during the twelve year time period. Crop yields are found to have a higher sensitivity to variations in soil moisture rather than variations in temperature. Our results suggest that high elevation croplands are more susceptible to climate variability than low elevation croplands, and that adaptation strategies to conserve soil moisture in these croplands can help to offset the increasing temperatures from climate change.