During the week of June 15, 2015, a group of 14 DSSAT developers were gathered at the Maricopa Agricultural Center (MAC) of the University of Arizona for the 3rd DSSAT Development Sprint Workshop 2015.
The main purpose of this workshop is for the DSSAT Developers to get together and polish the codebase collectively – but also openly discussed about the overall DSSAT code improvement opportunity/directions and learned from each other on how DSSAT is being used in different cropping systems to answer a variety of research questions.
Topics discussed at this Sprint includes (note some of these overlap with the topics of previous Sprints):
Specific crops
- Taro
- ASI maize
- Sorghum model
- CROPGRO-Wheat — vernalization, head vs. pods
- Cassava
- Forage model within DSSAT shell (5 species)
- Sugar beet
- Handling of new species, crops
- Internal standardization of growth stages
Plant processes
- Pest and disease coupling
- Winter crops under snow cover and air temperature
Soil, Plant, Atmosphere
- FAO-56 ET
- Potassium
- Soil Temperature — linkage with energy balance
- Energy balance
- Root growth
- Tillage
- 2D Water and N balance model (roots too)
- DRAINMOD management modules
- Weather data — filling missing
- Automation irrigation options: limited water, forecasts, growth stage
- Linking seasonal climate models
- Forced automatic planting
General CSM functionality (I/O, etc.)
- Flexible model control/input formats
- Flexible model output formats
- Improved data structures for inputs/outputs
- Compliance with ICASA standards
- Incorporating totally new models
- Parameter Estimation (with time-series data) — Metropolis-Hastings
- Model evaluation: sensitivity, initialization, cross validation (test suites)
- Next Generation object-oriented CSM
General modeling-related
- Data standards, data interchange
- ICASA Data Exchange
- C programming of models
DSSAT per se
- DSSAT 4.6 release
- Incorporating new tools in DSSAT shell
- DSSAT as a web service, cloud services
- Plan for systematic releases of DSSAT
Software management
- Open source strategy
- Issue Tracking System (Jira)
- Model documentation
- Managing tools or other software via Github
Feel free to suggest any other topics that you think the next Sprint to cover.
