Identifying environments for canola oil production under diverse seasonal crop water stress levels

Canola (Brassica napus L.) is a dual-purpose oilseed crop with a potential to close an increasing demand/supply gap for biofuel production. To increase oil production, it is imperative to identify the best production regions and to understand these environments the production environments to inform management decisions. The aims of this study were to) characterize water stress patterns in the major US winter canola production and its implications to determine regions with similar yield and oil production. With this purpose, a field observed dataset was curated from the National Winter Canola Variety Trial (NWCVT). This dataset comprises 88 sites covering around 26 US states for the 2003–2019 time period and includes phenology data and the description of the management practices for more than 400 varieties. The observed flowering date, maturity date, yield, and oil concentration were used to train and evaluate APSIM Canola. Crop phenology and seed yield presented adequate model performance (Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE)= 0.08, 0.19; Kling-Gupta model Efficiency (KGE)= 0.89, 0.68, respectively) while model performance was inferior for oil concentration (NRMSE=0.49, KGE=0.08). Three spatial clusters were defined based on water stress frequency, yield, and oil concentration. Geographically from East to West, yield and oil productivity decreased with increasing water stress frequency. This study provides new insights on identifying potential regions for oil production and on closing the increasing demand/supply gap.