Future harvest : the fine line between myopia and utopia

Inaugural lecture upon taking up the post fo Personal Professor of Plant Production Systems at Wageningen University on 12 May 2011

Crop models: main developments, their use in CGMS and integrated modeling

Het artikel beschrijft de voornaamste ontwikkelingen in gewasgroeimodellen (WOFOST), hun gebruik in CGMS en geïntegreerde modellerin

Yield gap analysis—Rationale, methods and applications—Introduction to the Special Issue

Yield gap analysis is an increasingly popular concept. It is a powerful method to reveal and understand the biophysical opportunities to meet the projected increase in demand for agricultural products towards 2050, and to support decision making on research, policies, development and investment that is needed. This Special Issue presents the state-of-the-art about concepts, methods and applications of yield gap analysis. The methodological papers emphasize the need for agronomically sound and relevant analyses, from local to global scales. The fourteen papers provide examples of applications to different crops, climate zones and production conditions, at various spatial extents and with different approaches and data availability. The overall goal of this Special Issue is to provide the scientific foundation for improvement and interpretation of yield gap analyses

New Approaches to Support Development of Sustainable Land Use Systems

In this paper, the land use planning cycle is introduced and some recent efforts at developing appropriate methodologies for supporting some of its distinct phases are illustrated. The examples still largely bear an academic character, but since there is increasing demand by policy makers for integrated land use analysis studies, they may serve as building blocks for development of operational methodologies for land use policy ormulation and analysis. Their potential impacts on planning procedures and chievement of land use objectives are high, particularly when they are further developed and operationalized in settings that allow participation and involvement of the various user group