Crop Diseases and Climate Change in the AgMIP Framework.

The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) has teams of researchers who are collaborating to compare multiple crop and economic models in order to understand their capabilities for broad use in climate change impact and adaptation assessments. The overall aim is to substantially improve capabilities of agricultural scientists to perform such assessments at regional to global scales. In addition, multiple crop and economic models have been used to perform climate change impact assessments. However, none of the models used in those comparisons and assessments considered the effects of diseases or pests on the productivity and management of crops. This is a major limitation of those studies. A new effort has been initiated to incorporate diseases into the portfolio of AgMIP projects such that this limitation in future assessments will be overcome, building on the protocol-based, open, interdisciplinary approaches being used in other initiatives. An interdisciplinary AgMIP team was formed to address the following questions.  What are the most important diseases that are limiting food production globally, and what is the status of modeling and models for those diseases and cropping systems? What approaches should be used to incorporate those models with crop models for climate change studies? What is the current state of plant disease models relative to their potential use with crop and economic models for climate change assessments? This presentation summarizes initial results of the findings of this team, laying out the various approaches used to model the diseases, how the models are currently being used in climate change assessment research, the approaches used to combine those models with crop models, and new protocols for intercomparing and improving these models. Examples will be given for two of the world’s major food crops.