Abstract: A requirement for successful integration of soil, crop and economic models is a relevant interface of the three. Economic farming models deal with choice of crops, crop management during growing season and stock management after harvest. With detailed daily weather information the state of the soil might be simulated so that a suitable sowing date can be estimated. Moreover with rational beliefs with respect to future crop prices, and with a crop model which responds to management, the management during the growing season might be optimized with respect to choice of cultivar, fertilization and irrigation. So far, as reflected by Müller and Robertson (2014), predictions of future crop yields according to crop models take only to small extent such farmer responses into account, and might therefore overestimate the responses of crop harvests to climate.Comparison of soil, crop and economic simulations with observed weather and crop outcomes might lead to estimation/calibration of unobserved parameters in all models. Such exercises need generic soil, crop and economic models which do not leave modelling outcomes to the crop modeller’s or economist’s discretion. No Label

Abstract: The spatial distribution of future European landuse will be influenced by yield changes arising from climate change and changes in profitability as a consequence of socio-economic change (arising from changing food demand; prices; technology etc).  To understand how these factors affect future land use allocation, a modelling system has been set up to predict agricultural land use across the EU under any scenario set of climate and socio- and techno-economic data. Metamodels of crop and forest yields, and optimal cropping and profit are derived from the outputs of the IMPEL, GOTILWA+, SFARMODand WaterGAP models. Profitability of each possible land use is modelled across the EU, assuming that use will change to the most profitable in the timescale being considered (2050). Land use in a grid is then allocated based on profit, with minimum profit thresholds set for intensive agriculture (arable or grassland), extensive agriculture, managed forest and finally unmanaged forest or unmanaged land.  The European demand for food as a function of population, imports, food preferences and bioenergy, is a production constraint, as is irrigation water available.  The model iterates prices until demand is satisfied (or cannot be met) and basin water usage for irrigation is not more than is available.This presentation describes the application of the modelling system across future climate change uncertainty space (as given by 60 combinations of downscaled 10’x10’ gridded climate outputs from 5 Global Climate Models, 3 climate sensitivities and 4 emissions scenario) under both baseline and four future socio-economic scenarios to identify those areas of Europe in which the spatial allocation of agricultural landcovers are robust to this uncertainty. No Label

Abstract: Climate and soil data at coarse resolution are often used as input for crop models in order to simulate crop yields at larger scales, e.g. at regional or national level, potentially leading to biased yield estimates. While the response to data resolution differs between crop models, it is unknown how the spatial aggregation of different types of input data interacts and contributes to this so-called aggregation effect. An ensemble of crop models was run with soil and climate input data at different spatial resolutions from 1 to 100 km for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. For this purpose, climate time series were averaged spatially and soil data was aggregated by selecting the dominant soil type with a representative soil profile based on a soil map at the scale of 1:50,000. Yields of winter wheat and silage maize were simulated under potential, water-limited and water-nitrogen-limited production conditions. Crop yields from soil and climate aggregation were evaluated separately.Mean of crop yields of the region and over the simulation period were reasonably reproduced by most models regardless of input data resolution, either using aggregated soil or climate as input. However, larger aggregation effects were observed at higher temporal resolution (e.g. annual yields). Models revealed similar spatial patterns in yield. Being distinct for soil and climate aggregation, these patterns indicate a larger impact of soil aggregation on the spatial distribution of simulated crop yield for this region. Additionally, models differed considerably in their susceptibility to input data aggregation. The results reveal the importance of model ensemble assessments and the relevance of data aggregation when short simulation periods are considered. No Label