Significance: Food security under climate change depends on the yield performance of staple food crops. We found a decline in the climate resilience of European wheat in most countries during the last 5 to 15 y, depending on the country. The yield responses of all the cultivars to different weather events were relatively similar within northern and central Europe, within southern European countries, and specifically regarding durum wheat. We also found serious Europe-wide gaps in wheat resilience, especially regarding yield performance under abundant rain. Climate resilience is currently not receiving the attention it deserves by breeders, seed and wheat traders, and farmers. Consequently, the results provide insights into the required learning tools, economic incentives, and role of public actors.

Soils are vital for supporting food security and other ecosystem services. Climate change can affect soil functions both directly and indirectly. Direct effects include temperature, precipitation, and moisture regime changes. Indirect effects include those that are induced by adaptations such as irrigation, crop rotation changes, and tillage practices. Although extensive knowledge is available on the direct effects, an understanding of the indirect effects of agricultural adaptation options is less complete. A review of 20 agricultural adaptation case‐studies across Europe was conducted to assess implications to soil threats and soil functions and the link to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The major findings are as follows: (a) adaptation options reflect local conditions; (b) reduced soil erosion threats and increased soil organic carbon are expected, although compaction may increase in some areas; (c) most adaptation options are anticipated to improve the soil functions of food and biomass production, soil organic carbon storage, and storing, filtering, transforming, and recycling capacities, whereas possible implications for soil biodiversity are largely unknown; and (d) the linkage between soil functions and the SDGs implies improvements to SDG 2 (achieving food security and promoting sustainable agriculture) and SDG 13 (taking action on climate change), whereas the relationship to SDG 15 (using terrestrial ecosystems sustainably) is largely unknown. The conclusion is drawn that agricultural adaptation options, even when focused on increasing yields, have the potential to outweigh the negative direct effects of climate change on soil degradation in many European regions.

The availability of big data in agriculture, enhanced by free remote sensing data and on-board sensor-based data, provides an opportunity to understand within-field and year-to-year variability and promote precision farming practices for site-specific management. This paper explores the performance in durum wheat yield estimation using different technologies and data processing methods. A state-of-the-art data cleaning technique has been applied to data from a yield monitoring system, giving a good agreement between yield monitoring data and hand sampled data. The potential use of Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 images in precision agriculture for within-field production variability is then assessed, and the optimal time for remote sensing to relate to durum wheat yield is also explored. Comparison of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index(NDVI) with yield monitoring data reveals significant and highly positive linear relationships (r ranging from 0.54 to 0.74) explaining most within-field variability for all the images acquired between March and April. Remote sensing data analyzed with these methods could be used to assess durum wheat yield and above all to depict spatial variability in order to adopt site-specific management and improve productivity, save time and provide a potential alternative to traditional farming practices.