Die Bodenkultur - Journal for Land Management, Food and Environment

J. Eitzinger, H. Formayer, S. Thaler, M. Trnka, Z. Zdenek and V. Alexandrov:

Aspects on results and uncertainties of climate change impact simulation studies for agricultural crop production in Europe

Summary

Climate change impact research in agriculture involves the complex soil-crop-atmosphere interactions and human determined systems such as socio-economic conditions. Furthermore it is based on climate scenarios, which were developed from various climate models and methods based on underlying assumptions of future emission scenarios. All these modeled systems and their interactions include therefore many different kind of uncertainties and limitations, such as trends in technology and human activities, models representation of reality, lack of knowledge on system responses or lack of calibration data. However, these uncertainties and limitations often are not clearly described and a potential source of misinterpretations. This paper will provide therefore an overview on the main sources of uncertainties in recent modeling studies on climate change impacts on agricultural crop production. Key words: Climate scenarios, climate change impacts, agriculture, crop production, uncertainties.