Uncertainties in assessing climate change impacts and adaptation options with wheat crop models

Mechanistic and process-oriented crop models are important tools to quantify the potential impacts of climate change on crop production and yields and to evaluate the efficacy of management strategies, policies, or actions developed by the stakeholders. This review focusses on the epistemic uncertainty associated with the use of crop models. It firstly identifies the main sources of uncertainties from the perspectives of crop model inputs, methods for estimating crop parameters, crop model structure/complexity/process scale, and the underpinning experimental datasets. Pathways for managing those uncertainties are identified and future research directions are discussed. The conclusion is that strengthening experimental studies on the effects of extreme temperatures including their interaction with enhanced atmospheric CO2 concentration on crop production and further improvement, evaluation, and inter-comparison of crop models based on new experimental datasets will contribute to the reduction of uncertainties in projected climate change impacts and evaluated adaptation options. It is envisaged that crop models will continue to serve as an important research tool in addressing climate change in the agricultural sector specifically and in general with respect to global food security. Therefore, this review will provide the agroclimate impact modelling community with information on the sources of uncertainties and the ways forward to tackle this critical issue.