A regional implementation of WOFOST for calculating yield gaps of autumn-sown wheat across the European Union
2012
BOOGARD Hendrik | WOLF Joost | SUPIT Iwan | NIEMEYER Stefan | VAN ITTERSUM Martin
The Crop Growth Monitoring System (CGMS) is regularly applied for regional monitoring of growing conditions, for simulating growth and yields of the main arable crops, and for producing regional yield forecasts over Europe. These crop growth simulations are done with CGMS-WOFOST to calculate the potential and water limited yields for the main crop types over Europe, of which we analyze here the results for winter wheat. The yield gaps for winter wheat in regions over Europe are subsequently derived from the difference between these potential (for irrigated areas) and water- limited (for rain fed areas) yields and the actual yields. The strengths and limitations of the use of the CGMS yield data for calculating the yield gap for winter wheat over Europe are analyzed. Main conclusions are that for most regions over Europe the yield gap can be based on the simulated water limited yields minus the actual yields, and the simulated potential and water limited yields and other simulated crop characteristics appear to be plausible for most regions over Europe. In small areas in Spain and Italy the applied method did not provide plausible result as a result of unrealistic simulated harvest index, maximum leaf area index and biomass. However, these problems can easily be solved and after small changes, CGMS-WOFOST is suitable to calculate yield gaps over Europe with sufficient precision.
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