Develop a web service portfolio to support the adaptation of agriculture, forestry and water management to climate change

The adaptation to climate change of agriculture and forestry as well as water management requires tools to predict the effect of multiple scenarios combining agronomy, forestry, water management and climatic components in any physical environment, in order to anticipate negative effects of climate change, and to test and choose the most relevant strategies anywhere. A project is currently developed for building integrated tools and delivering services, encouraging midterm and strategic adaptation over France, by coupling agronomy, forestry and hydrology models. This project presents two main aspects: 1) an analysis of stakeholders demands, which has already shown that different spatial levels (territory, hydrological basin and whole France) would have to be considered, that demands are multiple and multiform, declined according to different levels of information (general information on the effect of climate change on agriculture and forestry, site vs. crop rotation modeling, up to totally distributed spatiotemporal agro-hydrologic modeling including economic dimensions); 2) an inventory of the currently available databases and models (climate, soil, crop and hydrology) and an analysis on how to couple them and overcome sectorial vision. The objective of a first step is to elaborate the specifications of one or several detailed integrated model(s), taking into account the demands of the stakeholders. Indeed, they request several innovations for the dissemination of research on adaptation: sharing knowledge and concepts, web mapping tools to display and examine maps or databases computed by modeling coupled water-agriculture-climate, or the making available models online at allowing the user to test by himself adaptation's options. Such a portfolio of services requires calculations in the past climate, present and future, with combination of emission scenarios, climate models and downscaling methods to achieve a spatial resolution consistent with the decisions of farmers and foresters to adapt production and the corresponding economic sectors. Several crop and forest models should also be used in order to take into account the uncertainty related to the ability of impact models to reproduce all the processes. Such a portfolio of services requires calculations in the past climate, present and future, with the combination of emission scenarios, climate models and downscaling methods to achieve a spatial resolution consistent with the decisions of the farmers and foresters to adapt production and related economic sectors. Several agricultural and forestry models should be proposed to represent the uncertainty due to the vide range of impact models, reproducing more or less processes. Finally, multi-criteria evaluation (economic, social, biotech) adaptation options will be made possible. This project is developed by Inra and partners (Irstea, BRGM, CEA, CNRS, Universities, Météo France, …) under the umbrella of Allenvi, the National Research Alliance for the Environment.