ABSTRACT

Agricultural development is influenced by intricately related series of factors. Some of them can be controlled by humans (e.g., farm operations) while others cannot (e.g., climate). Throughout history, climate’s impact on agriculture has been of great concern to farmers, researchers, politicians, and others. However, only during the past decade have attempts been made to systematically analyze this impact, resulting mainly in modeling crop productivity systems and delineating agroclimatic zones. Essentially, the underlying mechanism of the approach for identifying agroclimate information requirements for land evaluation is a continuous refinement of categorization. When speaking of agroclimate information requirements, one should bear in mind that this is a rather fuzzy concept. The situation or context for which agroclimate information has to be collected can be conceived as multidimensional and can be described by two distinct major variables: the time span and the spatial coverage.