Drivers of Crop Productivity and Resource Use Efficiencies in Apple between Western and Eastern States in the US

Apple is cultivated under various climatic conditions in many parts of the world. Better understanding of how climate, genotype, soil, and management factors interact to determine crop productivity will improve our ability to optimize crop selection, management strategies, and resource use efficiencies. We developed and applied a physiology-based apple canopy model to evaluate how climatic factors and crop phenotypes interact to determine biomass accumulation, radiation use efficiency (RUE), and water use efficiency (WUE) at multiple production sites between western and eastern states of the US including WA, CA, NY, WV, and PA. Our results indicate that solar radiation is a dominant factor limiting biomass production in the eastern states while VPD is the primary factor governing crop water use across eastern and western states during the peak growing season. Crop RUE and WUE were strongly correlated in the western states but not in the eastern states while VPD showed highly negative correlation with both RUE and WUE across all locations. The RUE improved with increasing fraction of diffuse radiation ($f_{df}$) and the $RUE-f_{df}$ relationships revealed distinctive responses between western and eastern states. Overall, the eastern locations exhibited slightly higher RUE and WUE than the western locations. However, overall productivity and total water use were greater in the western states. A clear decline of productivity with increasing temperature and afternoon VPD past an optimum was predicted in the western locations but this pattern was less clear in the eastern locations. We also discuss potential phenotypes with specific physiological and morphological traits that are differentially suitable for western and eastern locations. Our results provide plausible, spatially explicit explanations and insights to disentangle the complex relationships between crop productivity, resource use efficiencies, phenotype, and climate drivers in apple grown in the US.