Uncertainty-aware neural emulation reveals climate-resilient maize traits at scale

원문 초록

Climate change threatens maize yields worldwide, yet identifying which genetic traits sustain productivity under future conditions requires exploring an enormous space of genotype, soil, and climate combinations that process-based crop models are too costly to simulate at scale. Here we develop an integrated probabilistic emulation framework that transforms a mechanistic crop simulator (APSIM) into a fast, uncertainty-aware discovery engine. Built from two million simulations and coupled to a generative weather model that produces realistic climate sequences, the emulator reproduces thirteen maize growth outputs with high fidelity while returning calibrated confidence for every prediction, at a fraction of the original computational cost. Applying it across 100,000 trait configurations, six locations, and future climate projections extending to the year 2100, we identify 1,114 trait combinations that remain resilient under the 2100 future conditions and a stricter subset of 246 configurations that remain resilient across four future projection periods: 2040, 2060, 2080, and 2100. These resilient configurations occupy a distinct region of trait space, combining high radiation use efficiency with characteristic shifts in developmental and reproductive traits. Trait-importance analysis further identifies radiation use efficiency as the dominant driver of yield under future climate, while projected yields vary widely across locations and climate models, indicating strong spatial heterogeneity in the maize response to climate change.