Assessment of the Use and Promotion of the Agroclimatic Atlas of Québec and Other Agrometeorology Tools

To help raise awareness among Québec’s agricultural stakeholders and support their decision making on adaptation to climate change, an agroclimatic atlas and several technical agrometeorology documents have been produced and distributed by the CRAAQ under various projects.

A few years after their publication, it appears appropriate to conduct an assessment of the impacts of the dissemination of these tools and documents among Québec’s agricultural community.

• Encourage the acquisition of knowledge and greater use of the Agroclimatic Atlas of Québec and technical agrometeorology documents by more stakeholders in the agricultural sector.

• Assess the dissemination and use of the Agroclimatic Atlas of Québec and technical agrometeorology documents by analyzing information already available regarding their dissemination and use and by means of an online users’ survey and a discussion group;

• Identify user‘s needs for information in agrometeorology and desired improvments;

• Continue dissemination activities including the production of a video capsule, the organization of a webinar and the writing of a blog post.

An analysis of the traffic statistics for the Atlas website reveals that close to 7,000 “users”, as defined by Google Analytics, consulted the Atlas in 2013, or about one-fifth of all users of the Agrométéo Québec website. Overall, excluding a decrease in 2015, visits to the Atlas site have remained steady since it went online, and it is assumed that the number of users has done the same.

Despite this encouraging data, the Atlas remains unknown to many stakeholders in the agricultural sector. Efforts have been made to increase awareness of the Atlas and technical agrometeorology documents and to facilitate their adoption by stakeholders in their respective activities.

A discussion group and telephone interviews were conducted to collect testimonials from users on the concrete applications of the Atlas in their work. This exercise identified multiple uses for agroclimatic information, such as the integration of Atlas data into various other projects, choosing crops or cultivars, planning planting schedules, and many more.

These testimonials led to the production of two videos (video 1, video 2) and a blog article that have been made available on a range of platforms, including AgriRéseau.

The project revealed what information is used in the Atlas (indices, sections, options) and for what purposes. In general, information on current climate with a more direct link to decision making and the better-known indices is consulted most often, such as, for example, frost risk used to plan spring planting (Figure).

Figure . Proportion of the number of page views by agroclimatic index from 2013 to 2018

At the end of the project, it appears that the Agroclimatic Atlas of Québec has achieved, at least for the most part, the objectives set at the time of its conception. However, to prevent it from becoming obsolete, it is urgent to bring it up to date in order to provide users with the latest agroclimatic data and to improve it to better meet the expectations of today’s agricultural sector.

To guide such a process, several recommendations are proposed, including:

• Improving various aspects related to mapping (interactivity, interoperability, spatial resolution);

• Creating a more user-friendly user interface;

• Allowing customization of various thresholds and calculation periods;

• Providing a closer future climate horizon (2030);

• Providing more training; Improving documentation;

• Updating the Atlas on a regular basis.