Agriculture & Food, Volume 5, 2017

Abstract: Wheat is one of the most important crops used as a global food source. For this reason, it is extremely important how wheat will be affected in the future by ongoing and possible changes in climate both quantitatively and qualitatively. That’s why, numerous studies have been conducted for the estimation of future agrometeorological conditions. Among these conditions, especially higher temperatures and lack of water for plant consumption due to decreased precipitation come to forefront for semi-arid regions like the Thrace part of Turkey. Hence, high reliability is needed within studies on future climate projections which can be taken as meteorological inputs of the dynamic crop growth models into consideration. Such models can mimic the behaviour of rather complex crop system. In order to avoid misleading results, they should be priorly calibrated using actual field data. This study represents one of the first aforementioned steps taken at a location in the Thrace region of Turkey by means of investigation of the possible future variations of wheat. Agricultural management information together with meteorological data were collected directly from an agrometeorological station. Then, calibration procedure was applied to two crop growth models, namely DSSAT and WOFOST by considering one recent growing season (2010-2011) of the selected winter wheat field in Kırklareli city of the Thrace. Later, calibration is repeated also for the representation of long term (1975-2010) mean wheat growth of the field. Finally, the outputs of a regional climate model (RegCm4) were adapted into the crop models for the estimation of the future periods between the years 2013 and 2040. As a result, both models indicated slight decreases (2 to 6 %) in average wheat grain yield, whereas no such agreement could be found between the models.