Variation in patterns of production and water-use efficiency among agroecosystems

Across agroecosystems, water is a key driver of primary production, and the relationship between precipitation and production (i.e., water-use efficiency; WUE) provides an important indicator for evaluating agroecosystem resilience to changes in water availability. While this relationship has been well-characterized in relatively unmanaged, native ecosystems, cross-site syntheses spanning diverse agroecosystems and climate gradients are lacking. We leveraged the USDA's Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) network to assess the relationship between annual precipitation and aboveground net primary production (ANPP) across an extensive set of climate conditions and agroecosystems, representing native rangelands, croplands, and pasturelands and various management intensities. We utilized long-term ANPP data (mean = 17 years) from fifteen sites spanning a large precipitation gradient (265 to 1347 mm yr⁻¹). We observed a positive relationship between annual precipitation and productivity across precipitation gradients; however, this nonlinear pattern differed from native ecosystems and varied by agroecosystem type. Rangeland ANPP was strongly coupled to annual precipitation, increasing nearly 20% for every 100 mm of precipitation. Croplands and pasturelands showed significantly decreased sensitivity, although grouping crops by photosynthetic pathway and crop type revealed some significant patterns. Underlying these patterns in sensitivity were large differences in overall ANPP among agroecosystems; cropland ANPP was up to 6.7-fold greater than rangelands and 2.6-fold greater than pasturelands, despite overlapping precipitation gradients. While agroecosystem type captured much of the variability in the precipitation-production relationship at the continental scale, understanding the more subtle differences in precipitation sensitivities will be fundamental for identifying production vulnerabilities and adapting to changing water resources.