Model-aided climate adaptation for future maize in the U.S.

Over the next three decades, rising population and changing dietary preferences are expected to increase food demand by 25-75%. At the same time climate is also changing –with potentially drastic impacts on food production. Breeding new crop characteristics and adjusting management practices are critical avenues to mitigate yield loss and sustain yield stability under a changing climate. In this study, we use a mechanistic crop model (MAIZSIM) to identify high-performing trait and management combinations that maximize yield and yield stability for different agroclimate regions in the US under present and future climate conditions. We show that morphological traits such as total leaf area and phenological traits such as grain-filling start time and duration are key properties that impact yield and yield stability; different combinations of these properties can lead to multiple high-performing strategies under present-day climate conditions. We also demonstrate that high performance under..., This data was generated using the MAIZSIM model as described in the associated manuscript. The raw model output is stored in a database format and we also include the code that processed the model output into intermediate files which were then analyzed. , , # **Data in support of: Model-Aided Climate Adaptation for Future Maize in the U.S.**

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8w9ghx3v1](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8w9ghx3v1)

This dataset contains processed meterological data, databases containing the hourly output from 100 member ensembles of simulated maize growing seasons driven by the meteorology data, and post-processed output used to generate figures. We also archived a snapshot of the code used to generate the figures at the time of publication.

### **Maize simulation model**

We used a process-based crop simulation model, MAIZSIM, to carry out our simulations across site-years in US maize growing regions. MAIZSIM is a mechanistic crop model that simulates key physiological, phenological, and physical processes such as leaf gas-exchange, canopy radiative transfer, carbon partitioning, water relations, nitrogen dynamics, and phenological development at the organ level to explain the whole-plant responses and crop level phenomena (Kim...