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Dalgaard, T. (2015). Models for regional scale farming system evaluation of climate change mitigation options and environmental impact assessment (Vol. 5).
Abstract: The aim of the present paper is to exemplify and discuss the importance of farm scale modeling in relation to The EU Joint Programming Initiative (JPI-FACCE) knowledge hub on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change project.In particular, livestock production systems include complex interactions, with non-linear relationships between input factors, production, emissions, local climate as well as natural resources (e.g. soil types, rotational land versus permanent grasslands etc.). Moreover, management options pursued by the different types of farmers and other relevant decision makers are important to integrate. Consequently, results of regional scale impact assessments depend on the farming systems model approach, the approach to upscale results, and the inclusion of the relevant stakeholders and decision makers at the scales considered.Different farming systems models are reviewed, including the existing dynamic and static biophysical models. Finally, procedures for upscaling and validity testing of synthesized model results at regional scales are presented. Based on a discussion of these procedures, recommendations for hot-spot analyses in farming systems with regard to integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation for a sustainable food production are synthesized, and the potentials for integration of recommended policies and farm management options into overarching models in order to assess their impact on the regional to global scales are discussed. No Label
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Ferrise, R., Toscano, P., Pasqui, M., Moriondo, M., Primicerio, J., Semenov, M. A., et al. (2015). Monthly-to-seasonal predictions of durum wheat yield over the Mediterranean Basin. Clim. Res., 65, 7–21.
Abstract: Uncertainty in weather conditions for the forthcoming growing season influences farmers’ decisions, based on their experience of the past climate, regarding the reduction of agricultural risk. Early within-season predictions of grain yield can represent a great opportunity for farmers to improve their management decisions and potentially increase yield and reduce potential risk. This study assessed 3 methods of within-season predictions of durum wheat yield at 10 sites across the Mediterranean Basin. To assess the value of within-season predictions, the model SiriusQuality2 was used to calculate wheat yields over a 9 yr period. Initially, the model was run with observed daily weather to obtain the reference yields. Then, yield predictions were calculated at a monthly time step, starting from 6 mo before harvest, by feeding the model with observed weather from the beginning of the growing season until a specific date and then with synthetic weather constructed using the 3 methods, historical, analogue or empirical, until the end of the growing season. The results showed that it is possible to predict durum wheat yield over the Mediterranean Basin with an accuracy of normalized root means squared error of <20%, from 5 to 6 mo earlier for the historical and empirical methods and 3 mo earlier for the analogue method. Overall, the historical method performed better than the others. Nonetheless, the analogue and empirical methods provided better estimations for low-yielding and high-yielding years, thus indicating great potential to provide more accurate predictions for years that deviate from average conditions.
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Baranowski, P. (2015). Multifractal analysis of meteorological time series to assess climate impact on chosen regions of Europe (Vol. 5).
Abstract: Over the last decades modelling of climate change through the analysis of empirical meteorological data has become of great interest. The standard approach gives satisfactory results only in the climatic zones with extreme dynamics of climate change, thus there is need to develop and apply more subtle methods such as fractal analysis and chaotic evolution analysis of the atmospheric system. The scaling analysis of meteorological time series is complicated because of the presence of localized trends and nonstationarities. The objective of this study was to characterize scaling properties (i.e. statistical self-similarity) of the daily air temperature, wind velocity, relative air humidity, global radiation and precipitation through multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis on data from 31 years for stations located in Finland, Germany, Poland and Spain. The empirical singularity spectra indicated their multifractal structure. The richness of the studied multifractals was evaluated by the width of their spectrum, indicating considerable differences in dynamics and development. The log-log plots of the cumulative distributions of all the studied absolute and normalized meteorological parameters tended to linear functions for high values of the response, indicating that these distributions were consistent with the power law asymptotic behaviour. Additionally, we investigated the type of multifractality that underlies the q-dependence of the generalized Hurst exponent, by analysing the corresponding shuffled and surrogate time series. The results suggest that MFDFA is valuable for assessing the change of climate dynamics. No Label
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Baranowski, P., Krzyszczak, J., Slawinski, C., Hoffmann, H., Kozyra, J., Nieróbca, A., et al. (2015). Multifractal analysis of meteorological time series to assess climate impacts. Clim. Res., 65, 39–52.
Abstract: Agro-meteorological quantities are often in the form of time series, and knowledge about their temporal scaling properties is fundamental for transferring locally measured fluctuations to larger scales and vice versa. However, the scaling analysis of these quantities is complicated due to the presence of localized trends and nonstationarities. The objective of this study was to characterise scaling properties (i.e. statistical self-similarity) of the chosen agro-meteorological quantities through multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA). For this purpose, MFDFA was performedwith 11 322 measured time series (31 yr) of daily air temperature, wind velocity, relative air humidity, global radiation and precipitation from stations located in Finland, Germany, Poland and Spain. The empirical singularity spectra indicated their multifractal structure. The richness of the studied multifractals was evaluated by the width of their spectrum, indicating considerable differences in dynamics and development. In log-log plots of the cumulative distributions of all meteorological parameters the linear functions prevailed for high values of the response, indicating that these distributions were consistent with power-law asymptotic behaviour. Additionally, we investigated the type of multifractality that underlies the q-dependence of the generalized Hurst exponent by analysing the corresponding shuffled and surrogate time series. For most of the studied meteorological parameters, the multifractality is due to different long-range correlations for small and large fluctuations. Only for precipitation does the multifractality result mainly from broad probability function. This feature may be especially valuable for assessing the effect of change in climate dynamics.
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Martre, P., Wallach, D., Asseng, S., Ewert, F., Jones, J. W., Rötter, R. P., et al. (2015). Multimodel ensembles of wheat growth: many models are better than one. Glob. Chang. Biol., 21(2), 911–925.
Abstract: Crop models of crop growth are increasingly used to quantify the impact of global changes due to climate or crop management. Therefore, accuracy of simulation results is a major concern. Studies with ensembles of crop models can give valuable information about model accuracy and uncertainty, but such studies are difficult to organize and have only recently begun. We report on the largest ensemble study to date, of 27 wheat models tested in four contrasting locations for their accuracy in simulating multiple crop growth and yield variables. The relative error averaged over models was 24-38% for the different end-of-season variables including grain yield (GY) and grain protein concentration (GPC). There was little relation between error of a model for GY or GPC and error for in-season variables. Thus, most models did not arrive at accurate simulations of GY and GPC by accurately simulating preceding growth dynamics. Ensemble simulations, taking either the mean (e-mean) or median (e-median) of simulated values, gave better estimates than any individual model when all variables were considered. Compared to individual models, e-median ranked first in simulating measured GY and third in GPC. The error of e-mean and e-median declined with an increasing number of ensemble members, with little decrease beyond 10 models. We conclude that multimodel ensembles can be used to create new estimators with improved accuracy and consistency in simulating growth dynamics. We argue that these results are applicable to other crop species, and hypothesize that they apply more generally to ecological system models.
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