During the week of September 25-29, 2023, the DSSAT Team the from University of Florida (UF/IFAS) participated in the AMEI Development Sprint in Montpellier, France, hosted by the Laboratory of Ecophysiology of Plants under Environmental Stress (LEPSE) of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (INRAE).
The vision of Agricultural Model Exchange Initiative (AMEI; see GitHub and Crop2ML.org) is to advance agricultural research through the use of and application of crop simulation models. The participants in the AMEI Development sprint worked on the comparison and exchange of the soil temperature modules that have been developed in the different crop modeling platforms, including DSSAT (www.DSSAT.net) that has been developed at the University of Florida. The accurate simulation of soil temperature is very important because of all the soil biophysical and chemical processes that occur and that have a direct impact on crop growth, development, and yield. In addition to DSSAT, the other crop modeling platforms that participated included BioMa, OpenAlea, SIMPLACE, SiriusQuality, STICS and Monica.
The AMEI Development Sprint included participants from the US based DSSAT, INRAE and CIRAD from France, the University of Bonn and ZALF from Germany, as well as virtual participants from CREA and JRC from Italy. The next AMEI Development Sprint will be hosted by the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida.
The activities associated with AMEI have resulted in a recent paper entitled “Crop modeling frameworks interoperability through bidirectional source code transformation” authored by C.A. Midingoyi, C. Pradal, A. Enders, D. Fumagalli, P. Lecharpentier, H. Raynal, M. Donatelli, D. Fanchini, I.N. Athanasiadis, C. Porter, G. Hoogenboom, F.A.A. Oliveira, D. Holzworth, and P. Martre, published in Environmental Modeling & Software 168 (2023) 105790. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2023.105790.
