Abstract: Climate Services (CS) provide support to decision makers across socio-economic sectors. In the agricultural sector, one of the most important CS applications is to provide timely and accurate yield forecasts based on climate prediction. In this study, the Pasture Simulation model (PaSim) was used to simulate, for the period 1959–2015, the forage production of a mown grassland system (Laqueuille, Massif Central of France) under different management conditions, with meteorological inputs extracted from the SAFRAN atmospheric database. The aim was to generate purely climate-dependent timeseries of optimal forage production, a variable that was maximized by brighter and warmer weather conditions at the grassland. A long-term increase was observed in simulated forage yield, with the 1995–2015 average being 29% higher than the 1959–1979 average. Such increase seems consistent with observed rising trends in temperature and CO2, and multi-decadal changes in incident solar radiation. At interannual timescales, sea surface temperature anomalies of the Mediterranean (MED), Tropical North Atlantic (TNA), equatorial Pacific (El Niño Southern Oscillation) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index were found robustly correlated with annual forage yield values. Relying only on climatic predictors, we developed a stepwise statistical multi-regression model with leave-one-out cross-validation. Under specific management conditions (e.g., three annual cuts) and from one to five months in advance, the generated model successfully provided a p-value<0.01 in correlation (t-test), a root mean square error percentage (%RMSE) of 14.6% and a 71.43% hit rate predicting above/below average years in terms of forage yield collection. This is the first modeling study on the possible role of large-scale oceanic–atmospheric teleconnections in driving forage production in Europe. As such, it provides a useful springboard to implement a grassland seasonal forecasting system in this continent.

Abstract: This deliverable focuses on the collation, screening, and consolidation of data for selected grassland sites in Europe and peri-Mediterranean regions. No Label

Abstract: This deliverable focuses on the some illustrative results obtained with the grassland models selected (D-L2.1.1) to simulate biomass and flux data from grassland sites in Europe and peri-Mediterranean regions (D-L2.1.1 and D-L2.1.2). This is a blind exercise, carried out without model calibration. The complete set of results will include simulations from calibrated models. The results shown are illustrative of the methodology adopted for grassland model intercomparison in MACSUR. The insights gained from this ongoing study are relevant for some crop and vegetation models, which in some cases proved comparable to grassland-specific models to simulate biomass data from managed grasslands.   The results reported here cannot be considered conclusive.   Additional results will be published as they become available together with calibration results, as well as the comprehensive evaluation of models with fuzzy logic-based indicators. No Label