During the week of December 7, 2015, a group of 21 DSSAT developers from around the world were gathered at IFDC Headquarters in Muscle Shoal, Alabama, for the 4th DSSAT Development Sprint Workshop.
This was another “working” workshop with emphasis on code development and model and tool improvement. Specific issues/topics discussed during the Sprint includes:
Specific crops
- Taro
- Tanier
- Rice (to check rainfed and delayed anthesis under water deficits)
- Maize (to incorporate anthesis-silking interval)
- Millet model
- Sorghum model
- CROPGRO-Wheat (to check vernalization, head vs. pods)
- Cassava
- Forage model within DSSAT shell (5 species)
- Sugar beet
- Handling of new species, crops especially within CropGro
- Internal standardization of growth stages (mainly CropGro)
- Sugar cane
- Alfalfa
- CERES-Wheat (to check temperature response)
- Hutton-Potato model
- Maize and Rice: by-product wt in Summary.OUT
Plant processes
- Pest and disease coupling
- Winter crops under snow cover and air temperature
- High-temperature responses vs statistical analyses
- Very low temperature model crashes — winter wheat
- Pest Module for grazing
- Crop death due to prolonged water deficits, exposure to drought, etc.
Soil, Plant, Atmosphere
- FAO-56 ET
- Potassium
- Soil temperature — EPIC as default
- Soil Temperature — linkage with energy balance
- Energy balance
- Soil evaporation — needs checking
- Root growth
- Tillage
- 2D Water and N balance model (roots too)
- DRAINMOD management modules
- Weather data — filling missing. Avoid crashes?
- Automation irrigation options: limited water, forecasts, growth stage
- Handling of fertigations, N in irrigation, as irrigations events
- Linking seasonal climate models
- Forced automatic planting
- Fertilizer codes and N sources, including N in irrigation water
- Salinity
- Drainage
General CSM functionality
- CSV output format
- Flexible model control/input formats
- Flexible model output formats
- Improved data structures for inputs/outputs
- Compliance with ICASA dictionary
- Incorporating totally new models (e.g., like ORYZA or N-Wheat)
- Parameter Estimation (with time-series data) — Metropolis-Hastings
- Model evaluation: sensitivity, initialization, cross validation (test suites)
- Next Generation object-oriented CSM
- Handling or inter-cropping, species mixtures
- Grazing
- Livestock? — nutrient return, etc.
- Harvest errors in sequencing
- Official DSSAT R package/interface
General modeling-related
- Data standards, data interchange
- ICASA Data Exchange
- C programming of models
- Weather data file handling
DSSAT per se
- DSSAT 4.6 release
- Incorporating new tools in DSSAT shell
- Optimizer for time series data
- Life Cycle Analysis tool
- Weather projection tool for in season
- Simulation viewer that allows stepping through daily values
- DSSAT as a web service, cloud services
- Plan for systematic releases of DSSAT
- Allow new models to run w/o modifying DSSAT code
- Advanced DSSAT users workshop
- Software management
- Doxygen listing for 4.6
- Open source strategy
- Issue Tracking System (Jira, Trello)
- Github issue tracking via Zen Desk
- Model documentation
- Managing tools or other software via Github
