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Author Özkan, Ş.; Vitali, A.; Lacetera, N.; Amon, B.; Bannink, A.; Bartley, D.J.; Blanco-Penedo, I.; de Haas, Y.; Dufrasne, I.; Elliott, J.; Eory, V.; Fox, N.J.; Garnsworthy, P.C.; Gengler, N.; Hammami, H.; Kyriazakis, I.; Leclère, D.; Lessire, F.; Macleod, M.; Robinson, T.P.; Ruete, A.; Sandars, D.L.; Shrestha, S.; Stott, A.W.; Twardy, S.; Vanrobays, M.L.; Ahmadi, B.V.; Weindl, I.; Wheelhouse, N.; Williams, A.G.; Williams, H.W.; Wilson, A.J.; Østergaard, S.; Kipling, R.P.
Title Challenges and priorities for modelling livestock health and pathogens in the context of climate change Type Journal Article
Year 2016 Publication Environmental Research Abbreviated Journal Environ. Res.
Volume 151 Issue Pages 130-144
Keywords
Abstract Climate change has the potential to impair livestock health, with consequences for animal welfare, productivity, greenhouse gas emissions, and human livelihoods and health. Modelling has an important role in assessing the impacts of climate change on livestock systems and the efficacy of potential adaptation strategies, to support decision making for more efficient, resilient and sustainable production. However, a coherent set of challenges and research priorities for modelling livestock health and pathogens under climate change has not previously been available. To identify such challenges and priorities, researchers from across Europe were engaged in a horizon-scanning study, involving workshop and questionnaire based exercises and focussed literature reviews. Eighteen key challenges were identified and grouped into six categories based on subject-specific and capacity building requirements. Across a number of challenges, the need for inventories relating model types to different applications (e.g. the pathogen species, region, scale of focus and purpose to which they can be applied) was identified, in order to identify gaps in capability in relation to the impacts of climate change on animal health. The need for collaboration and learning across disciplines was highlighted in several challenges, e.g. to better understand and model complex ecological interactions between pathogens, vectors, wildlife hosts and livestock in the context of climate change. Collaboration between socio-economic and biophysical disciplines was seen as important for better engagement with stakeholders and for improved modelling of the costs and benefits of poor livestock health. The need for more comprehensive validation of empirical relationships, for harmonising terminology and measurements, and for building capacity for under-researched nations, systems and health problems indicated the importance of joined up approaches across nations. The challenges and priorities identified can help focus the development of modelling capacity and future research structures in this vital field. Well-funded networks capable of managing the long-term development of shared resources are required in order to create a cohesive modelling community equipped to tackle the complex challenges of climate change.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 0013-9351 ISBN Medium Article
Area Expedition Conference
Notes LiveM Approved no
Call Number MA @ admin @ Serial 4766
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Author Daccache, A.; Ciurana, J.S.; Diaz, J.A.R.; Knox, J.W.
Title Water and energy footprint of irrigated agriculture in the Mediterranean region Type Journal Article
Year 2014 Publication Environmental Research Letters Abbreviated Journal Environ. Res. Lett.
Volume 9 Issue 12 Pages 124014
Keywords food security; CO2 emissions; nexus; water productivity; water resources; climate-change; southern spain; management; impacts; deficit; grids
Abstract Irrigated agriculture constitutes the largest consumer of freshwater in the Mediterranean region and provides a major source of income and employment for rural livelihoods. However, increasing droughts and water scarcity have highlighted concerns regarding the environmental sustainability of agriculture in the region. An integrated assessment combining a gridded water balance model with a geodatabase and GIS has been developed and used to assess the water demand and energy footprint of irrigated production in the region. Modelled outputs were linked with crop yield and water resources data to estimate water (m(3) kg(-1)) and energy (CO2 kg(-1)) productivity and identify vulnerable areas or `hotspots’. For a selected key crops in the region, irrigation accounts for 61 km(3) yr(-1) of water abstraction and 1.78 Gt CO2 emissions yr-1, with most emissions from sunflower (73 kg CO2/t) and cotton (60 kg CO2/t) production. Wheat is a major strategic crop in the region and was estimated to have a water productivity of 1000 tMm(-3) and emissions of 31 kg CO2/t. Irrigation modernization would save around 8 km(3) of water but would correspondingly increase CO2 emissions by around +135\%. Shifting from rain-fed to irrigated production would increase irrigation demand to 166 km(3) yr(-1) (+137\%) whilst CO2 emissions would rise by +270\%. The study has major policy implications for understanding the water-energy-food nexus in the region and the trade-offs between strategies to save water, reduce CO2 emissions and/or intensify food production.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1748-9326 ISBN Medium Article
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CropM, ft_macsur Approved no
Call Number MA @ admin @ Serial 4747
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Author Jägermeyr, J.; Gerten, D.; Schaphoff, S.; Heinke, J.; Lucht, W.; Rockström, J.
Title Integrated crop water management might sustainably halve the global food gap Type Journal Article
Year 2016 Publication Environmental Research Letters Abbreviated Journal Environ. Res. Lett.
Volume 11 Issue 2 Pages 025002
Keywords sustainable intensification; yield gap; water harvesting; conservation agriculture; irrigation efficiency; food security; climate change adaptation; sub-saharan africa; rain-fed agriculture; dry-spell mitigation; supplemental irrigation; climate-change; smallholder irrigation; environmental impacts; developing-countries; semiarid region; south-africa
Abstract As planetary boundaries are rapidly being approached, humanity has little room for additional expansion and conventional intensification of agriculture, while a growing world population further spreads the food gap. Ample evidence exists that improved on-farm water management can close water-related yield gaps to a considerable degree, but its global significance remains unclear. In this modeling study we investigate systematically to what extent integrated crop water management might contribute to closing the global food gap, constrained by the assumption that pressure on water resources and land does not increase. Using a process-based bio-/agrosphere model, we simulate the yield-increasing potential of elevated irrigation water productivity (including irrigation expansion with thus saved water) and optimized use of in situ precipitation water (alleviated soil evaporation, enhanced infiltration, water harvesting for supplemental irrigation) under current and projected future climate (from 20 climate models, with and without beneficial CO2 effects). Results show that irrigation efficiency improvements can save substantial amounts of water in many river basins (globally 48% of non-productive water consumption in an ‘ambitious’ scenario), and if rerouted to irrigate neighboring rainfed systems, can boost kcal production significantly (26% global increase). Low-tech solutions for small-scale farmers on water-limited croplands show the potential to increase rainfed yields to a similar extent. In combination, the ambitious yet achievable integrated water management strategies explored in this study could increase global production by 41% and close the water-related yield gap by 62%. Unabated climate change will have adverse effects on crop yields in many regions, but improvements in water management as analyzed here can buffer such effects to a significant degree.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1748-9326 ISBN Medium Article
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CropM, TradeM Approved no
Call Number MA @ admin @ Serial 4733
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Author Weindl, I.; Lotze-Campen, H.; Popp, A.; Müller, C.; Havlík, P.; Herrero, M.; Schmitz, C.; Rolinski, S.
Title Livestock in a changing climate: production system transitions as an adaptation strategy for agriculture Type Journal Article
Year 2015 Publication Environmental Research Letters Abbreviated Journal Environ. Res. Lett.
Volume 10 Issue 9 Pages 094021
Keywords livestock; climate impacts; land use modeling; adaptation costs; production systems; greenhouse-gas emissions; global change; management implications; developing-countries; crop productivity; change mitigation; food security; model; impacts; carbon
Abstract Livestock farming is the world’s largest land use sector and utilizes around 60% of the global biomass harvest. Over the coming decades, climate change will affect the natural resource base of livestock production, especially the productivity of rangeland and feed crops. Based on a comprehensive impact modeling chain, we assess implications of different climate projections for agricultural production costs and land use change and explore the effectiveness of livestock system transitions as an adaptation strategy. Simulated climate impacts on crop yields and rangeland productivity generate adaptation costs amounting to 3% of total agricultural production costs in 2045 (i.e. 145 billion US$). Shifts in livestock production towards mixed crop-livestock systems represent a resource-and cost-efficient adaptation option, reducing agricultural adaptation costs to 0.3% of total production costs and simultaneously abating deforestation by about 76 million ha globally. The relatively positive climate impacts on grass yields compared with crop yields favor grazing systems inter alia in South Asia and North America. Incomplete transitions in production systems already have a strong adaptive and cost reducing effect: a 50% shift to mixed systems lowers agricultural adaptation costs to 0.8%. General responses of production costs to system transitions are robust across different global climate and crop models as well as regarding assumptions on CO2 fertilization, but simulated values show a large variation. In the face of these uncertainties, public policy support for transforming livestock production systems provides an important lever to improve agricultural resource management and lower adaptation costs, possibly even contributing to emission reduction.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1748-9326 ISBN Medium Article
Area Expedition Conference
Notes LiveM, ft_macsur Approved no
Call Number MA @ admin @ Serial 4718
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Author Mansouri, M.; Destain, M.-F.
Title Predicting biomass and grain protein content using Bayesian methods Type Journal Article
Year 2015 Publication Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment Abbreviated Journal Stoch. Environ. Res. Risk Assess.
Volume 29 Issue 4 Pages 1167-1177
Keywords crop model; particle filter; prediction; ensemble kalman filter; parameter-estimation; particle filters; decision-support; state estimation; model; nitrogen; navigation; tracking; systems
Abstract This paper deals with the problem of predicting biomass and grain protein content using improved particle filtering (IPF) based on minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The performances of IPF are compared with those of the conventional particle filtering (PF) in two comparative studies. In the first one, we apply IPF and PF at a simple dynamic crop model with the aim to predict a single state variable, namely the winter wheat biomass, and to estimate several model parameters. In the second study, the proposed IPF and the PF are applied to a complex crop model (AZODYN) to predict a winter-wheat quality criterion, namely the grain protein content. The results of both comparative studies reveal that the IPF method provides a better estimation accuracy than the PF method. The benefit of the IPF method lies in its ability to provide accuracy related advantages over the PF method since, unlike the PF which depends on the choice of the sampling distribution used to estimate the posterior distribution, the IPF yields an optimum choice of this sampling distribution, which also utilizes the observed data. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of estimation accuracy, root mean square error, mean absolute error and execution times.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) English Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN 1436-3240 1436-3259 ISBN Medium Article
Area Expedition Conference
Notes CropM Approved no
Call Number MA @ admin @ Serial 4664
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