Between September 9-13, 2024, the DSSAT team from the University of Florida (UF) participated in the 15th 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 Agricultural Model Exchange Initiative (AMEI; see on GitHub and Crop2ML.org) aims to advance agricultural research through the use and application of crop simulation models. In this development sprint, participants concentrated on comparing and exchanging soil temperature modules across various crop modeling platforms. Development of a protocol for reverse modeling where the soil temperature models exported in the same programming language using Crop2ML are imported into the full crop model. A protocol was developed to simulate soil temperature using a bare soil temperature study in Ames, Iowa for 10 years from 1982 to 1990 and 1995. The crop modeling platforms involved in this effort include BioMa, SIMPLACE, SiriusQuality, STICS, and Monica, as well as DSSAT developed at the University of Florida. The APSIM group also joined the AMEI initiative, contributing to the exchange of soil temperature models.
Participants in the AMEI Development Sprint came from various institutions, including the University of Florida (USA), CSIRO (Australia), Plant & Food Research (New Zealand), INRAE and CIRAD (France), and the University of Bonn and ZALF (Germany), with additional virtual participation from CREA and JRC (Italy). The next AMEI Development Sprint is tentatively set for Summer 2025.
