Abstract: Numerous climate futures are now available from global climate models. Translation of climate data such as precipitation and temperatures into ecologically meaningful outputs for managers and planners is the next frontier. We describe a model-based open platform to assess vulnerabilities of agricultural systems to climate change on pixel-wise data. The platform includes a simulation modeling engine and is suited to work with NetCDF format of input and output files. In a case study covering a region (Auvergne) in the Massif Central of France, the platform is configured to characterize climate (occurrence of arid conditions in historical and projected climate records), soils and human management, and is then used to assess the vulnerability to climate change of grassland productivity (downscaled to a fine scale). We demonstrate how using climate time series, and process-based simulations vulnerabilities can be defined at fine spatial scales relevant to farmers and land managers, and can be incorporated into management frameworks. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract: Integrated land use models (ILM) featuring agronomic and economic drivers of land use are frequently applied to serve the high information demand of stakeholders. This presentation results from collaboration among bio-economic farm modelers across the MACSUR regional pilot studies (www.macsur.eu) and shall compare and finally reveal good practice examples on the representation of climate change adaptation in bio-economic farm models. First results show a considerable diversity of approaches employed in the MACSUR regional pilot studies. All are programming models that optimize more or less elaborated forms of utility. All consider or plan to consider crop yield impacts from bio-physical crop models based on daily-resolution climate data. While some models include pest and diseases or livestock impacts, none take climate change impacts on market prices or interactions among farms into account so far. Clearly, adaptation options determine the solution space and are mainly expert-based in the regional case studies. Overall, the models are normative and analyze economically rational and optimal land use and management at the farm level, capable of showing the likely direction of differences in future management as a response to exogenous parameter changes (prices, yields, disease pressure, changed policy conditions, etc.). Such detailed models and their results may be applied in stakeholder interaction. Integrating the different direct and indirect effects of climate change, including the policy dimension, is the main contribution of farm level modelling of agricultural systems in the domain of climate change adaptation research. No Label