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Recent trends in European seasonal weather conditions and related crop water requirements, crop water consumption and crop water deficits were studied using the Crop Growth Monitoring System of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission for the period 1976–2005. Soft wheat was selected as a typical winter crop. Sugar beet was selected as a typical spring/summer crop. First we analyzed the spatial and temporal variation of the average seasonal mean temperature and the average seasonal estimated global radiation, subsequently the spatial and temporal variation of the simulated seasonal water requirement, water consumption and water deficit of wheat and sugar beets were studied. We found that the weather pattern changes are not uniformly distributed across Europe. A seasonal dependence was found. The impacts of the changing weather patterns differ per crop and per region. In various European regions the wheat water requirement showed a downward trend which can be attributed to a shorter growing season as a result of higher temperatures in spring. This downward trend can also be attributed to a lower evaporative demand in winter and spring as a result of diminishing global radiation values. Only a limited number of regions showed an upward trend. For sugar beets the Mediterranean regions of France and Spain showed a downward trend in the water requirement which can be attributed to a lower evaporative demand due to reduced solar radiation in summer and autumn. Large areas with an upward trend in the water requirement are spread across the rest of Europe. These upward trends can be attributed to higher temperatures in summer and autumn. The regional trend patterns in actual crop water consumption and water deficit are less distinct than found for the crop water requirements. Changes in these variables can be attributed to the combined effect of variations in crop water requirements and rainfall.

The Agri-Environmental Zonation (AEnZ) is a biophysical typology based on a recently available detailed database on organic carbon content of the topsoil of Europe, the Environmental Stratification (EnS) and an Agri-mask. The AEnZ is used within the integrated assessment framework of SEAMLESS. The basis for this typology is the Environmental Stratification of Europe (EnS) building mainly on climate and altitude characteristics. The 84 environmental strata were aggregated into 13 environmental zones (EnZs). The environmental zones were then combined with organic carbon topsoil data (OCTOP) to cover the wide range of agri-environmental diversity of Europe. The OCTOP content was selected as soil variable as it explained most of the variation in soils in Europe. The EnZs/OCTOP land units were combined with an Agri-mask representing major obstacles for farming resulting in the final AEnZ typology. The Agri-mask, which is based on CORINE Land Cover, soil, altitude and slope data, divides Europe into three zones with different agricultural potential (suited, unsuited and marginally suited). The AEnZ consists of 238 land types of which 82 classes are referred as suitable for agriculture (75.8% of EU27+). For the SEAMLESS framework two of the three dimensions of the Agri-Environmental Zonation have been used to build the spatial framework to link information on farming and biophysics. The spatial building block of SEAMLESS is thus the Seamzones, that is an overlay of the 13 environmental zones, the seven OCTOP classes and 270 administrative (NUTS2) regions. In total this results in 3,513 Seamzones that are used to structure the biophysical data as well as the data on farming across the EU27+.