The Influence of Climate on Agricultural Decisions for Three European Crops: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The severity and uneven distribution of the expected climate change impacts across climate-sensitive agricultural areas, and the cropping systems operated within, call for identification, and effective management of these impacts. The climate services have the potential to help identifying and adequately addressing the expected changes in climate and their impacts on agricultural production systems. However, the development of effective climate services is conditioned by the need to clearly understand the critical decisions that underpin end-users' activities and how climate information can support those decision-making processes. This paper reviews and identifies the main decisions linked to key climate change impacts on the cropping systems of interest-olive, grape and durum wheat-in order to inform the development of climate services for these crops in the future. Our review results indicate two types of key findings: (i) the most common types of decisions across the three cropping systems address the increase in temperature, variability, and uneven distribution of rainfall, occurrence of extreme events, and increased solar radiation; (ii) the most common decisions are likely to be affected by an increase in temperature above the maximum supported by the three crops, or in combination with other impacting climate changes. These decisions mainly relate to irrigation and other water stress reducing measures (olive, durum wheat), choice of varieties (grape, durum wheat), clones and rootstocks (grape), training system and vine load (olive, grape), canopy management (olive, grape), change in planting/sowing and harvest date (olive, durum wheat), pest and disease management (grape), allocation/choice of cultivation area (grape, durum wheat), use of decision support tools (grape), and crop insurance (durum wheat). In these decision-making contexts, the timely availability of climate information on temperature increase and rainfall variability can be used for developing climate services to effectively support the affected decisions. Although this paper does not provide an exhaustive analysis, the entry points identified can be considered as starting points for informing the development of climate services to further support the adjustment of decision making for the identified olive, grape, and durum wheat cropping systems, as well as similar decision-making contexts beyond those identified here.

Soil organic carbon under conservation agriculture in Mediterranean and humid subtropical climates: Globalmeta‐analysis

“…Thus, these areas are highly vulnerable and predicted climate change is expected to accentuate human‐induced desertification processes like intensive use of agricultural lands, poor irrigation practices, and deforestation (Ruiz et al, 2020; Spinoni et al, 2015; Underwood et al, 2009). In addition, an increase of extreme events and especially drought is expected in parts of the Mediterranean area and even in some humid areas (Mihailescu & Bruno Soares, 2020) where agricultural practices are also affecting soil fertility since the production system (based on winter wheat and maize, soybean and sunflower during summer) is based on intensive traditional plough‐based crop production systems (Mazzoncini et al, 2016).…”

The influence of climate change on rural community food crops production pattern in high humid rainforest agroecology in the southern part of Nigeria

“…Most studies (Mihailescu and Bruno Soares, 2020;Arora, 2019;Ali et al, 2017) on the influence of climate change are mainly on food production and its impact on crop yield, and not much work has been carried out on multicropping crop species practice under the prevailing climate conditions and its impact on the rural community in high humid rainforest agroecology in Southern part of Nigeria. Hence, we examine the impact of multicropping of crop species on the same piece of arable farmland in rural communities.…”

Influence of Climate Warming on Grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) Phenology in Conditions of Central Europe (Slovakia)

“…In established winegrowing regions, over a long history, growers have optimized yield and quality by choosing plant material and viticultural techniques according to climatic conditions, but as the climate changes adaptation measures that include changing of plant material (cultivars, rootstocks) [23,24] and viticultural techniques, e.g., changing trunk area, leaf area to yield ratio, pruning time, are inevitable to maintain the optimal period of harvest dates [25].…”