Abstract: Europe accounts for around 20% of the global cereal production and is a net exporter of ca. 15% of that production. Increasing global demand for cereals justifies questions as to where and by how much Europe’s production can be increased to meet future global market demands, and how much additional nitrogen (N) crops would require. The latter is important as environmental concern and legislation are equally important as production aims in Europe. Here, we used a country-by-country, bottom-up approach to establish statistical estimates of actual grain yield, and compare these to modelled estimates of potential yields for either irrigated or rainfed conditions. In this way, we identified the yield gaps and the opportunities for increased cereal production for wheat, barley and maize, which represent 90% of the cereals grown in Europe. The combined mean annual yield gap of wheat, barley, maize was 239 Mt, or 42% of the yield potential. The national yield gaps ranged between 10 and 70%, with small gaps in many north-western European countries, and large gaps in eastern and south-western Europe. Yield gaps for rainfed and irrigated maize were consistently lower than those of wheat and barley. If the yield gaps of maize, wheat and barley would be reduced from 42% to 20% of potential yields, this would increase annual cereal production by 128 Mt (39%). Potential for higher cereal production exists predominantly in Eastern Europe, and half of Europe’s potential increase is located in Ukraine, Romania and Poland. Unlocking the identified potential for production growth requires a substantial increase of the crop N uptake of 4.8 Mt. Across Europe, the average N uptake gaps, to achieve 80% of the yield potential, were 87, 77 and 43 kg N ha(-1) for wheat, barley and maize, respectively. Emphasis on increasing the N use efficiency is necessary to minimize the need for additional N inputs. Whether yield gap reduction is desirable and feasible is a matter of balancing Europe’s role in global food security, farm economic objectives and environmental targets.

Abstract: Increasing cereal yield is needed to meet the projected increased demand for world food supply of about 70% by 2050. Sirius, a process-based model for wheat, was used to estimate yield potential for wheat ideotypes optimized for future climatic projections for ten wheat growing areas of Europe. It was predicted that the detrimental effect of drought stress on yield would be decreased due to enhanced tailoring of phenology to future weather patterns, and due to genetic improvements in the response of photosynthesis and green leaf duration to water shortage. Yield advances could be made through extending maturation and thereby improve resource capture and partitioning. However the model predicted an increase in frequency of heat stress at meiosis and anthesis. Controlled environment experiments quantify the effects of heat and drought at booting and flowering on grain numbers and potential grain size. A current adaptation of wheat to areas of Europe with hotter and drier summers is a quicker maturation which helps to escape from excessive stress, but results in lower yields. To increase yield potential and to respond to climate change, increased tolerance to heat and drought stress should remain priorities for the genetic improvement of wheat.

Abstract: AimTo derive location-specific parameters that reflect the geographic differences among cultivars in vernalization requirements, sensitivity to day length (photoperiod) and temperature, which can be used to simulate the phenological development of wheat and maize at the global scale. LocationGlobal. Methods Based on crop calendar observations and literature describing the large-scale patterns of phenological characteristics of cultivars, we developed algorithms to compute location-specific parameters to represent this large-scale pattern. Vernalization requirements were related to the duration and coldness of winter, sensitivity to day length was assumed to be represented by the minimum and maximum day lengths occurring at a location, and sensitivity to temperature was related to temperature conditions during the vegetative development phase of the crop. Results Application of the derived location-specific parameters resulted in high agreement between simulated and observed lengths of the cropping period. Agreement was especially high for wheat, with mean absolute errors of less than 3 weeks. In the main maize cropping regions, cropping periods were over- and underestimated by 0.5-1.5 months. We also found that interannual variability in simulated wheat harvest dates was more realistic when accounting for photoperiod effects. Main conclusions The methodology presented here provides a good basis for modelling the phenological characteristics of cultivars at the global scale. We show that current global patterns of growing season length as described in cropping calendars can be largely reproduced by phenology models if location-specific parameters are derived from temperature and day length indicators. Growing seasons can be modelled more accurately for wheat than for maize, especially in warm regions. Our method for computing parameters for phenology models from temperature and day length offers opportunities to improve the simulation of crop productivity by crop simulation models developed for large spatial areas and for long-term climate impact projections that account for adaptation in the selection of varieties