Increasing crop risk of autumn barley, and the possible causes

Erdélyi, Éva – Novák, Aliz – Ladányi, Márta

Keywords: climate change, risk, crop volume, autumn barley

Climate change is a currently ongoing process, which requires Hungarian agricultural researchers and professionals to create functioning descriptive and forecasting systems. This paper covers the analysis of crop volume and changes over time from 1951 to the current days. We filtered out trend effects to make crop volume data for barley comparable. The study was done on Hajdú-Bihar county. Changes in the crop risk of the barley in the 1951-1990 period and later was assessed using the so-called E,V effectiveness parameter. The increase found in crop risk supports the view that climate is ‘visibly’ changing – the signs of which are seen nearly every day. The monitored meteorological variables can be used to construct indicators, which are assumed to have a decisive impact on the growth of individual plant species. In an attempt to find out what caused crop risk to increase, a climate change index built for precipitation – extreme quantities, frequency and number of days when it occurs – was tested for climate change scenarios.

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