Land surface interactions modeling (Agent-Based-Model - Dynamic Vegetation Model) over Belgium: current state and crop yield assessment for future (at the Belgian and European scales)

Agriculture in Europe is under substantial pressure. Farmers need to adapt to an ever-increasing global market, resulting in increasing competition and a high dependency on global food prices. Furthermore, they have to deal with an increasing urbanization pressure and to comply with increasingly strict environmental rules and policies, sometimes requiring heavy investments. Combined to potential impacts of climate changes on ecosystems functions and structures, these factors could lead to a change in land use structure.
In the framework of the MASC project ("Modelling and Assessing Surface Change impacts on Belgium and Western European climate"), we aim at providing a better understanding of these factors, with the final objective of improving regional climate model projections at the decennial scale over Belgium and Western Europe by combining high-resolution models. We propose to combine an agent-base model (ABM) and a dynamic vegetation model (DVM), CARAIB (“CARbon Assimilation In the Biosphere”). The ABM models the farmers as individual agents using a certain number of parcels. They decide on what to plant based on market prices, subsidies, crop rotations, personal preferences and the expected yield, which will be given by CARAIB.
CARAIB will be forced over Belgium with the outputs of the regional climate model ALARO (4 km resolution) for the recent past and for the most common crops. As a first attempt to assess the impact of the climate change on crops yields over Europe, CARAIB will be driven with the outputs of several regional climate models (RCMs), from EURO-CORDEX, nested in CMIP5 general circulation model projections: ALADIN53 (Météo-France/CNRM), RACMO22E (KNMI), RCA4 (SMHI) and REMO2009 (MPI-CSC) RCMs (0.11-degree, ≈12 km)