From June 16 to 20, 2025, the DSSAT team participated in the 16th 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; available on GitHub and Crop2ML.org) seeks to advance agricultural research through the use and integration of crop simulation models. During the recent AMEI Development Sprint, participants focused on the comparison and exchange of soil temperature modules across multiple crop modeling platforms. A key outcome of the sprint was advancement of the opinion paper and outline of the sensitivity analysis paper; major bug fixes for Crop2ML tool and the development of reverse modeling that enables soil temperature modules exported in a common programming language using the Crop2ML standard to be reintegrated into complete crop models. To test this approach, simulation protocols were implemented using observed data from a bare soil temperature study conducted in Ames, Iowa, US, and FACE experiments for wheat conducted for wheat in Maricopa, AZ, US. New protocols were also developed for wheat experiments that have been conducted in Bushland, Texas, US, and Avignon, France. Alongside the DSSAT team, other participating crop modeling platforms included APSIM, BioMa, SIMPLACE, SiriusQuality, STICS, and Monica. The accurate simulation of soil temperature is critical due to its direct impact on many soil biophysical and chemical processes, influencing crop growth, development, and yield.
The AMEI Development Sprint included participants from the US based DSSAT, INRAE and CIRAD from France, ZALF from Germany, as well as virtual participants from the University of Bonn, Germany and JRC from Italy. The next AMEI Development Sprint will be hosted by the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida in January, 2026. If you are interested in participating in the AMEI crop modeling activities, please contact Pierre Martre (pierre.martre@inrae.fr) at INRAe in France or Gerrit Hoogenboom (gerrit@ufl.edu) at the University of Florida.
