Objective
To provide an integrated assessment of the effects of climate change and climatic variability on agriculture in Europe. Research will follow two main themes: (i) the advancement of fundamental research on mechanistic crop-climate modelling, and (ii) the development of methodologies for scaling up site-based crop models to investigate regional climate change impacts.
Current crop-climate research will be extended by improving the performance of existing crop models in extreme
conditions and by considering climate change impacts on yield quality as well as general crop physiology.
Specifically, experiments on the effects of high temperature events on wheat growth, high temperature events and
drought on soya bean growth and elevated CO2 on grapevine growth and yield quality will be performed. All
experiments will be conducted in the first half of the project to ensure that results can be used directly to refine and
calibrate the relevant crop models.
Methods will be developed for applying mechanistic crop models at a hierarchy of scales to enable a full evaluation
of the effects of climate change on regional, national and continental agricultural production. Specifically, analyses
will be conducted at four principal scales: (i) complex mechanistic crop models will be run at a number of sites
throughout Europe; (ii) complex and reduced form mechanistic crop models will be applied at the regional scale for
a number of case study regions in Europe; (iii) simplified mechanistic crop models will be developed at the national
scale for Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Spain and Great Britain; and (iv) less data intensive mechanistic crop models
will be developed at a 0.5 latitude/longitude resolution across Europe. Site-specific and spatial impact models will
be developed in parallel. Procedures for integrating results will be devised which clearly differentiate between the
scales of analysis and the type of crop-climate interaction modelled.
An interactive framework for climate change impact assessment will be developed which integrates scenarios of
climate change and climatic variability with agricultural impact models at a variety of spatial and temporal scales.
Within this framework, the sensitivity of the crop models to changes in both mean climate and the variability of
climate will be analysed to identify thresholds in crop responses. Once the nature and magnitude of critical changes
in climate are identified the models will be tested with projections of future climate from transient general
circulation models. At each step in the impact assessment relevant uncertainties and their interactions will be
evaluated, including those from observational, experimental, modelling, scenario and spatial datasets.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinephysiology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
OX1 3TB OXFORD
United Kingdom