Maladaptation in cereal crop landraces following a soot-producing climate catastrophe

Chloee M. McLaughlin (), Yuning Shi, Vishnu Viswanathan, Ruairidh J. H. Sawers, Armen R. Kemanian and Jesse R. Lasky ()
Additional contact information
Chloee M. McLaughlin: University Park
Yuning Shi: University Park
Vishnu Viswanathan: University Park
Ruairidh J. H. Sawers: University Park
Armen R. Kemanian: University Park
Jesse R. Lasky: University Park

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-14

Abstract: Abstract Aerosol-producing catastrophes like nuclear war or asteroid strikes, though rare, pose serious risks to human survival. The injected aerosols would reduce solar radiation, lower temperatures, and alter precipitation, impacting crop productivity, including for locally adapted traditional crop varieties, i.e. landraces. We assess post-catastrophic climate effects on crops with extensive landrace cultivation, barley, maize, rice, and sorghum, under climate scenarios that differ in the quantity of soot injection. Using a crop growth model, we estimate environmental stress gradients and together with genomic markers apply gradient forest offset methods to predict post-catastrophic maladaptation in landraces over time. We find landraces are most maladapted where soot-induced climate shifts were strongest. Validating our approach, gradient forest models successfully capture a signal of maize landrace adaptation in common gardens across Mexico. We further use our gradient forest models to identify landrace varieties best matched to specific post-catastrophic conditions, indicating potential substitutions for agricultural resilience. The best substituted varieties require long migration distances, often across country borders, though countries with more climatic diversity have better within-country substitutions. Our findings highlight that a soot-producing catastrophe would drive global maladaptation in landraces and suggest current adaptive diversity is insufficient for agricultural resilience.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59488-6 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-59488-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-59488-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().