Project

EMRA aims at developing a tool to support crop and fruits farmers and agricultural consultants to manage short and long term weather extremes.
Within a three year project period we will employ two case studies: "apples in northern Germany" and "winter wheat in Uckermark" to develop EMRA as an online tool to provide lacking data to support decisions in managing weather risks. The relevant information will be provided for the long term also in the time beyond the project. This information will include diagrams on historic and acute weather extremes and newly developed warning messages specified to crops and locations. For that matter we combine carefully selected data on weather, soil and cultivation techniques with geographic information on field scale and provide useful and individualized outputs such as maps, thresholds and indices.
An important step to reach this goal is to implement an extreme weather monitoring, i.e. a system to report on the occurrence of extreme weather induced damage. Currently there is no systematic reporting of occurrence and impacts extreme weather available for agriculture Germany. Therefore many causal nexuses are still vague or even unknown. This gravely impedes assessing future risks.
EMRA is designed as a pilot scheme to first assess the impact of weather extremes in the case studies of winter wheat and apples. In case of success we intend to transfer the tested procedures to further crops and other regions. In any case all participating model businesses will have access to EMRA and related information also beyond the project time. Thus information on latest research results and activities on extreme weather management will be available to them also in the long term.