Van den Pol-van Dasselaar, A. (2014). Stakeholder consultation on functions of grasslands in Europe. FACCE MACSUR Mid-term Scientific Conference, 3(S) Sassari, Italy.
Abstract: Active participation of stakeholders was one of the key objectives of the FP7-funded project MultiSward (Grant Agreement n° FP7-244983). MultiSward aimed to increase the reliance of farmers on grasslands and on multi-species swards for competitive and sustainable ruminant production systems. Stakeholders were consulted via international and national meetings. Furthermore, an on-line questionnaire on the functions of grasslands was developed in eight languages and almost 2000 valid responses were obtained from European stakeholders. All of the stakeholder groups that were identified as being important in the stakeholder analysis responded to the questionnaire: primary producers, policy makers, researchers, advisors, NGO’s (for nature conservation and for protection of the environment), industry (mainly processing and seed industry) and education. This method of stakeholder consultation will be illustrated using the results on appreciation of the following functions of grasslands: adaptation to climate change, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration.
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Schönhart, M. (2014). Spillovers between MACSUR and Austrian climate change research projects. FACCE MACSUR Mid-term Scientific Conference, 3(S) Sassari, Italy.
Abstract: The Austrian regional case study in MACSUR extends the methods and builds upon the results of the CC-ILA project. CC-ILA enables cooperation between landscape planners and landscape ecologists to analyse mitigation and adaptation strategies for sustainable rural land use and landscape developments in a case study landscape. Subsequent research in MACSUR includes analysis towards rural development and the improvement of the climate impact data base for grasslands. The latter is achieved by collaborating with Crop-M partner LFZ Raumberg-Gumpenstein, who is able to utilize spill-overs within the Agromet-Monitor project.
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Lehtonen, H. S., Kässi, P., Korhonen, P., Niskanen, O., Rötter, R., Palosuo, T., et al. (2014). Specific problems and solutions in climate change adaptation in North Savo region. FACCE MACSUR Mid-term Scientific Conference, 3(S) Sassari, Italy.
Abstract: Crop production for feed dominates land use in North Savo in eastern Finland. The value of dairy and beef production is appr. 70 % of the total value of agricultural production of the region. In climate change adaptation research we are especially interested in dairy and meat sectors, which are directly dependent on the development of productivity of crop production. Climate change implies changes in cereals and forage crop yields and nutritive quality. There are most likely increasing problems and risks related to overwintering and growing periods. Grass silage is mainly self-produced on farms and most often there is no market for silage. Silage production and use are vulnerable to changes in local climate, because lost yield cannot be easily replaced from market. Risks and costs due to increasing inter-annual yield volatility can be reduced by good management practices, such as crop rotation, plant protection, soil improvements and better crop protection against plant diseases.However the profitability of such measures is dependent on market and policy conditions. Nevertheless new cultivars and species, as well as various options for production and risk management, are most likely needed in future climate. Some adaptations may have multiple benefits which however may realize only in medium or long run. It is important to safeguard the most important and obviously needed adaptations, and identify market and socio-economic conditions which inhibit farmers from necessary adaptations and lead to reduced productivity and increased production costs.
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Bodin, P. (2014). Simulating the sensitivity of carbon and water fluxes as well as yield within the ClimAfrica project. FACCE MACSUR Mid-term Scientific Conference, 3(S) Sassari, Italy.
Abstract: Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) is a region expected to be particularly sensitive to climate change effects on crop yield (Barrios et al. 2008). Annual precipitation, calculated as averages for each African country, is expected to change by −39 to +64 mm by 2030 (Jarvis et al. 2012). The effect of climate also becomes larger as ~97 % of all agricultural land in SSA is rain fed (Rockström et al. 2004). The aim of the ClimAfrica project (FP7) is to better understand and predict climate change in SSA and to analyse the impacts on ecosystems and populations. Within the modeling Work Package (WP3) the main goal is to quantify the sensitivity of vegetation productivity and water resources to seasonal interannual decadal variability in weather and climate using a set of crop models. Here we present some results on the sensitivity of simulated carbon fluxes and FAPAR for different representations of cropland in a vegetation model (LPJ-GUESS: Lindeskog et al. 2013) as well as the sensitivity on simulated fluxes of carbon water and crop yield using a range of vegetation and crop models (LPJ-GUESS, LPJmL, ORCHIDEE and DSSAT), climate datasets, GCM output and bias correction/downscaling techniques.
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Baranowski, P., Krzyszczak, J. R., & Sławiński, C. F. (2014). Self-similarity analysis of chosen agro-meteorological time series. FACCE MACSUR Mid-term Scientific Conference, 3(S) Sassari, Italy.
Abstract: The most usual records of observable agro-meteorological quantities are in the form of time series and the knowledge about their scaling properties is fundamental for transferring locally measured fluctuations to larger scales and vice-versa. However, the scaling analysis of these quantities 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 chosen agro-meteorological quantities through multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA). The MDFA analysis was performed for time series of the air temperature, wind velocity and relative air humidity (at the height of 2 m above the active surface) as well as the soil temperature (at 10 cm depth in the soil). The studied data were hourly interval, 12 years’ time series from the agro-meteorological station in Felin, near Lublin, Poland. The empirical singularity spectra indicated their multifractal structure. The richness of the studied multifractals was evaluated by the width of their spectrum, indicating their 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 analyzing the corresponding shuffled and surrogate time series. For majority of studied quantities, the multifractality was due to different long-range correlation for small and large fluctuations.
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