Abstract: • First model inter-comparison on crop rotations. • Continuous simulation of multi-year crop rotations yields outperformed single-year simulation. • Low accuracy of yield predictions in less commonly modelled crops such as potato, radish, grass vegetation. • Multi-model mean prediction was found to minimise the likely error arising from single-model predictions. • The representation of intermediate crops and carry-over effects in the models require further research efforts.
Diversification of crop rotations is considered an option to increase the resilience of European crop production under climate change. So far, however, many crop simulation studies have focused on predicting single crops in separate one-year simulations. Here, we compared the capability of fifteen crop growth simulation models to predict yields in crop rotations at five sites across Europe under minimal calibration. Crop rotations encompassed 301 seasons of ten crop types common to European agriculture and a diverse set of treatments (irrigation, fertilisation, CO2 concentration, soil types, tillage, residues, intermediate or catch crops). We found that the continuous simulation of multi-year crop rotations yielded results of slightly higher quality compared to the simulation of single years and single crops. Intermediate crops (oilseed radish and grass vegetation) were simulated less accurately than main crops (cereals). The majority of models performed better for the treatments of increased CO2 and nitrogen fertilisation than for irrigation and soil-related treatments. The yield simulation of the multi-model ensemble reduced the error compared to single-model simulations. The low degree of superiority of continuous simulations over single year simulation was caused by (a) insufficiently parameterised crops, which affect the performance of the following crop, and (b) the lack of growth-limiting water and/or nitrogen in the crop rotations under investigation. In order to achieve a sound representation of crop rotations, further research is required to synthesise existing knowledge of the physiology of intermediate crops and of carry-over effects from the preceding to the following crop, and to implement/improve the modelling of processes that condition these effects.

Abstract: There have been several studies, where process-based crop models are developed, used and compared in order to project crop production and corresponding model uncertainties under climate change. Despite many advances in this field, there are some correlations between climate variables and crop growth, such as pest and diseases, that is often absent in process-based models. Such relationships can be simulated using empirical models. In this study, several statistical techniques were applied on winter oilseed rape data collected in some European countries. The empirical models were then used to predict yield of winter oilseed rape in the field experiments during more than 20 years, up to 2013. Results suggest that newly developed regression techniques such as shrinkage methods work well both in yield projections and finding the influential climatic variables. Many of regression techniques agree in terms of yield prediction; however, choice of significant climate variables is rather sensitive to the choice of regression technique. No Label

Abstract: Statistical learning is a fairly new term referring to a set of supervised and unsupervised modelling and prediction techniques. It is based on traditional statistics but has been highly enhanced inspired by developments in machine learning and data mining. The main focus of statistical learning is to estimate the functions that quantify relations between several parameters and observed responses. These functions are further used for prediction, inference or a combination of both. For a particular case of quantitative responses, regularization techniques in regression are developed to overcome the weaknesses of ordinary least square (OLS) regression in prediction. These new shrinkage methods outperform OLS for prediction, especially in large datasets. In this study, a large dataset of field experiments on winter oilseed rape in Denmark for 22 years (1992 to 2013) was collected. Biweekly climatic data along with sowing date, harvest date, soil type and previous crop are considered as the explanatory variables. Yield of winter oilseed rape is considered as response variable. LASSO and Elastic Nets are the regularization techniques used to estimate the functions. Hold-one-out cross validation method for testing the prediction power reveals that these techniques are much useful in both prediction and inference. Since these techniques are included in recent versions of some software packages (e.g. R), they can be easily implemented by users at any level. The estimated function (model) is further used to predict the oilseed rape yield responses to climate change for several scenarios using representative weather data produced by a weather generator.