Relationships between ozone exposure and yield loss in European wheat and potato -: a comparison of concentration- and flux-based exposure indices

Data from open-top chamber experiments with field grown crops, performed in Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Italy and Germany, were combined to derive relationships between yield and ozone exposure for wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and potato (Solanum tuberosum L.). Three different exposure indices were compared: AOT40 (accumulated exposure over a threshold ozone concentration of 40 nmol mol(-1)), CUOt (cumulative stomatal uptake of ozone, using a constant ozone uptake rate threshold of t nmol m(-2) s(-1)) and mAOTc(0) (conductance modified AOT using a threshold concentration for ozone of c(0) nmol mol(-1)). The latter is essentially a combination of AOT and CUO. Ozone uptake was estimated using a Jarvis-type multiplicative model for stomatal conductance. In terms of correlation between relative yield (RY) and ozone exposure, CUO5, the CUO index with an ozone uptake rate threshold of 5 nmol m(-2) s(-1), performed best for both wheat and potato, resulting in r(2) values of 0.77 and 0.64, respectively. CUO5 performed considerably better in terms of the correlation between RY and ozone exposure, than AOT40 for wheat, while mAOT10, the best performing mAOT index in this case, was intermediate in performance for this crop. For potato, the differences between the different ozone exposure indices AOT40, CUO5 and mAOT20 (the mAOT index performing best for potato) in the correlation between RY and ozone exposure were relatively small. To test the assumption that the non-stomatal deposition of ozone was negligible for the uppermost, sunlit leaves, measurements of ozone uptake in relation to leaf conductance for water vapor of wheat leaves in a cuvette system were used. The non-stomatal deposition of ozone to the leaves turned out to be comparatively small. Based on the non-stomatal conductance (g(ns) = 15 mmol m(-2) s(-1)) estimated for the wheat leaves in the cuvette system, it was concluded that the consequence of omitting the non-stomatal conductance is small. In conclusion the study indicated that the ozone uptake based approach showed a high degree of fitting along a north-south European transect of pedoclimatic conditions, and represents a better and more relevant approach to the quantification of ozone effects on crops growth than the use of ozone exposure indices purely based on ozone concentrations. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.