Fodor – Pásztor: The agro-ecological potential of Hungary and its prospective development due to climate change - 177 - APPLIED ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH 8(3): 177-190. http://www.ecology.uni-corvinus.hu ● ISSN 1589 1623 (Print) ● ISSN 1785 0037 (Online)  2010, ALÖKI Kft., Budapest, Hungary THE AGRO-ECOLOGICAL POTENTIAL OF HUNGARY AND ITS PROSPECTIVE DEVELOPMENT DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE FODOR, N.* – PÁSZTOR, L. Research Institute for Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry of HAS Herman O., 15, 1022 Budapest, Hungary *Corresponding author e-mail: fodornandor@rissac.hu (Received 8 th September 2010 ; accepted 19 th November 2010) Abstract The climate change is one of the most relevant challenges that agriculture is facing in Hungary and all over the World. It is very difficult to express the agriculture related effects of the climate change in numbers and figures, since the atmosphere-soil-plant system is very complex. A crop simulation model was used for exploring the prospective effects of climate change on the agro-ecological potential of Hungary. The model was linked to a detailed meteorological and soil database of Hungary to provide the required input data. Simulations first employing measured meteorological data then combining them with a climate change scenario were used to determine the present and the prospective agro-ecological potential of Hungary. The simulation results indicate that the Hungarian agriculture can not avoid the effects of climate change, and unfortunately the majority of these effects would be negative. The yields of the spring crops will prospectively decrease while higher yields might be expected for the autumn crops. The amount of N-based green house gases emitted from the soil will prospectively increase because of the changes in the annual distribution of precipitation. On the basis of the simulation results the role of the autumn crops is likely to become more significant in Hungary. Another alternative for the Hungarian agriculture is to find new crops maybe species of Mediterranean origin that could be profitably grown here. Keywords: crop model, crop production, GHGs, nitrate leaching Introduction The Carpathian basin is an important area of crop production in Europe. Around 10 million tonnes yields of different crops are produced here for eight countries, not counting the exports. The majority of the agricultural land in the basin belongs to Hungary. Unfortunately the animal husbandry gradually fell into the background in the past decades, yet concerning its plant production, Hungary is among the best on the world regarding the average yields of her main crops. This result could be primarily owed to the outstanding natural endowments of the country: the majority of soils naturally have high water storing capacity and high nutrient content (Kovács et al., 2005) and the climate is favourable to many agricultural crops. Considering the performance of crops production in Hungary it is not a negligible factor that farmers are supported by such advisory systems as the RISSAC-RIA cost-effective and environmentally friendly fertilizer recommendation system (Csathó et al., 1998) that was awarded with the Hungarian Innovation Grand Prize in 2008. One of the most important questions that the Hungarian agriculture faces is whether this performance could be maintained in the future. More and more observations prove that the Middle-European climate is changing faster than in any other period in the past. Even the most cautious climate change scenarios predict more than 1 °C temperature increase (the average of different scenarios is 3 °C) combined with a decrease of precipitation by the end of this century. Using the method of spatial analogies (Adams