Wei et al. (2026) Diagnosing gridded relative food-provision shortfall under compound drought signals and cropland-background conditions in a humid-subtropical drought corridor

Identification

• Journal: Agricultural Water Management
• Year: 2026
• Date: 2026-09-03
• Authors: Qianjun Wei, Jie Tan, Siting Zhan, Xinying Yang, Jingfeng Xiao, De Yong Yu
• DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2026.110750

Research Groups

• College of Landscape Architecture and Art Design, Hunan Agricultural University
• Hunan Institute of Agricultural Economics and Information
• Institute for Territorial Spatial Governance and Green Development of the Yangtze River Basin
• Institute of Ecological Civilization, China University of Geosciences (CUG)

Short Summary

This study developed a mass-constrained framework to diagnose county-statistics-constrained relative food-provision shortfall at 1-km resolution in the Heng-Shao drought corridor, China. The results showed that compound drought signals were strongly associated with gridded relative food-provision shortfall under heterogeneous cropland and environmental conditions.

Objective

• Diagnose the spatial variation in relative food-provision shortfall under compound drought signals and cropland-background conditions

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: 1-km grid resolution
• Temporal Scale: Annual time series from 2013 to 2024

Methodology and Data

• Models used: CatBoost, SHAP, TreeSHAP
• Data sources:
  • County-level grain-production statistics
  • Landsat-derived Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) observations
  • Hydroclimatic variables (VPD, soil moisture, precipitation, PET, CWD)
  • Terrain and soil properties
  • Surface-water information
  • Road and water accessibility

Main Results

• The study found that vapour-pressure-deficit anomaly (Dvpd), soil-moisture anomaly (Dsoil), and climatic-water-deficit anomaly (Dcwd) were strongly associated with gridded relative food-provision shortfall.
• CatBoost achieved pooled out-of-fold coefficients of determination (R2) of 0.329–0.340 across 10–20 km spatial blocks.
• The three hydroclimatic indicators exhibited differentiated nonlinear responses and recurrent joint-attribution structures.

Contributions

• This study extends hydroclimatic analysis from vegetation responses towards the within-county diagnosis of statistically constrained relative food-provision shortfall.
• The results provide a spatially explicit diagnostic basis for characterising within-county relative food-provision shortfall under compound drought signals and cropland-background conditions.

Funding

• This research was funded by the Hunan Provincial Government (Comprehensive Governance Plan for the Heng-Shao Drought Corridor)

Citation

@article{Wei2026Diagnosing,
  author = {Wei, Qianjun and Tan, Jie and Zhan, Siting and Yang, Xinying and Xiao, Jingfeng and Yu, De Yong},
  title = {Diagnosing gridded relative food-provision shortfall under compound drought signals and cropland-background conditions in a humid-subtropical drought corridor},
  journal = {Agricultural Water Management},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1016/j.agwat.2026.110750},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2026.110750}
}