1. Reductions in natural habitat are implicated in declining honeybee Apis mellifera L. and wild bee populations, thereby threatening crop production. This concern has stimulated interest in identifying landscape-level impacts on bee-mediated pollination services, but previous studies have only inferred connections between landscape, bees and yield through generalized linear regressions. 2. We ...

New crop cultivars will be required for a changing climate characterised by increased summer drought and heat stress in Europe. However, the uncertainty in climate predictions poses a challenge to crop scientists and breeders who have limited time and resources and must select the most appropriate traits for improvement. Modelling is a powerful tool to quantify future threats to crops and hence...

Global gridded crop models (GGCMs) are increasingly used for agro-environmental assessments and estimates of climate change impacts on food production. Recently, the influence of climate data and weather variability on GGCM outcomes has come under detailed scrutiny, unlike the influence of soil data. Here we compare yield variability caused by the soil type selected for GGCM simulations to weat...

This paper describes the development of a Crop Knowledge Base System for use in crop modelling and yield forecasting. The inherent limitations of databases can cause problems for dealing effectively with geo-referenced data sets. The system described here includes all the normal database operations but also handles richer types of data. Values of queried attributes can be deduced through the us...

Process-based crop simulation models require employment of new knowledge for continuous improvement. To simulate growth and development of different genotypes of a given crop, most models use empirical relationships or parameters defined as genetic coefficients to represent the various cultivar characteristics. Such a loose introduction of different cultivar characteristics can result in bias w...

The limitation of damage caused by pests (plant pathogens, weeds, and animal pests) in any agricultural crop requires integrated management strategies. Although significant efforts have been made to i) develop, and to a lesser extent ii) combine genetic, biological, cultural, physical and chemical control methods in Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategies (vertical integration), there is a ...

Kyllmar, K. 2004. Nitrogen Leaching in Small Agricultural Catchments Modelling and monitoring for assessing state, trends and effects of counter-measures. Doctoral thesis. ISSN 1401-6249, ISBN 91-576-6761-6. Nitrogen (N) leaching from arable land to the aquatic environment is considered a serious problem. Small agricultural monitoring catchments in Sweden were used for the application and testi...

The current paradigm of global economics with exponential and continuous economic growth is unsustainable as far as Earth system ecology is concerned. To support the Earth system and boost sustainable development, a functional and operational linkage between global ecology and economics should be established – which we term ‘carbonomics’. The simple basis of ‘carbonomics’ is that the more fossi...

Agro-hydrological models have increasingly become useful and powerful tools in optimizing water and fertilizer application, and in studying the environmental consequences. Accurate prediction of water dynamics in such models is essential for models to produce reasonable results. In this study, detailed simulations were performed for water dynamics of rainfed winter wheat and barley grown under ...