The use of the land suitability rating system to assess the impacts of climate change on spring seeded small grains in the Peace River Alberta region

Abstract. The Land Suitability Rating System (LSRS) is a spatial modeling tool that generates a class rating for individual parcels of land for specific agricultural field crops based on a soil-climate-landscape potential. LSRS draws information from the Canadian Soil Information Service (CANSIS) soil name and layer tables, a crop parameter table and monthly normal temperature and precipitation values to generate a land rating where class 1 is fully suitable and class 7 in unsuitable. The system has traditionally been used to evaluate land suitability under current climate conditions. However, with climate change scenario data now readily available across the country we used LSRS to predict future changes in land suitability for spring seeded small grains in the Peace River district of Alberta. To evaluate the sensitivity of LSRS to varying climate inputs, we used two historical baseline (1951-1980, 1981-2010) and three future time periods (2011-2040, 2041-2070, 2071-210). Future projections giving a range of normal to hot and wet to dry scenarios were derived from five General Circulation Models (GCMs) covering two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP 4.5 and RCP8.5) Soils were ranked by texture and taxonomic groupings in their susceptibility to changing climate conditions. Total hectares of ranked soils were tallied and mapped. LSRS effectively integrated multiple soil, climate and landscape factors to illustrate that land suitability will be affected by both temperature and precipitation changes with a general trend (four of five models) toward increasing requirement for irrigation in order to maintain optimum cereal production in the coming century. Tile drainage was shown to increase ratings for all scenarios.