Pan-European EPIC [1] was extended and validated for major crops grown across Europe.
The EU-EPIC was integrated with the EURO-CRODEX climate domain [2], allowing AES to step into internationally coordinated climate change impact and adaptation studies at the pan-EU scale (such as CARBO-Extreme or IMPACT2C).
In 2013 major crops were integrated into global EPIC using the most complete global information currently available, and several calibration and up-scaling procedures were developed and implemented to improve gridded crop modelling [3].
This progress allowed AES to join the international Ag-GRID initiative which aims to improve global gridded crop modeling. The initiative brings together an international community of crop modelers who collaborate on coordinated global climate impact assessments on global food production. AES's contribution to the extensive Ag-GRID crop model inter-comparison has been evaluation of crop models forced with harmonized management and climate data.
The IIASA EPIC model was also used to assess numerous aspects of agricultural systems:
Figure 1. The level of confidence for climate change impacts on wheat yield potential for the 2090s (obtained from RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5 emission scenarios).
References
[1] Balkovič J, van der Velde M, Schmid E, Skalský R, Khabarov N, Obersteiner M, Stürmer B, Xiong W (2013). Pan-European crop modelling with EPIC: Implementation up-scaling and regional crop yield validation. Agricultural Systems 120: 61–75.
[2] Jacobs D, Petersen J, Eggert B, Alias A, Christensen OB, Bouwer LM, Braun A, Colette A , Deque M , Georgievski G, Georgopoulou E, Gobiet A, Menut L, Nikulin G, Haensler A, Hempelmann N, Jones C, Keuler K, Kovats S, Kroner N, Kotlarski S, Kriegsmann A, Martin E, van Meijgaard E , Moseley C , Pfeifer S, Preuschmann S, Radermacher C, Radtke K, Rechid D, Rounsevell M, Samuelsson P, Somot S, Soussana J –F, Teichmann C, Valentini R, Vautard R, Weber B, Yiou P (2013). EURO-CORDEX: New high-resolution climate change projections for European impact research. Regional Environmental Change in press doi: 10 1007/s10113-013-0499-2.
[3] Xiong W, Balkovič J, van der Velde M, Zhang X, Izaurralde RC, Skalský R, Lin E, Mueller N, Obersteiner M (2014). A calibration procedure to improve global rice yield simulations with EPIC. Ecological Modelling 273 128–139.
[4] Van der Velde M, Folberth M, Balkovič J, Ciais P, Fritz S, Janssens IA, Obersteiner M, See L, Skalský R, Xiong W, Peñuelas J (2014). African crop yield reductions due to increasingly unbalanced Nitrogen and Phosphorus consumption. Global Change Biology in press doi: 10 1111/gcb 12481
Collaborators
University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) Computation Institute, USA;
NASA GISS Climate Impacts Group, USA;
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research (PIK), Germany.
Research program
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313