Environmental Modelling & Software
Elsevier’s Environmental Modelling and Software Journal is calling for papers for a special thematic issue on: “Agricultural systems modelling and software: current status and future prospects”.
Scope
Process-based, agricultural systems models have been in use over the last 40 years as tools to evaluate the agronomic, economic and environmental performance of farming systems. They are increasingly used in applications of both short (i.e. farm performance, crop production monitoring) and long term (i.e. climate change impacts, food security, environmental policy) impacts. In 2003, a special issue appeared in European Journal of Agronomy (Van Ittersum and Donatelli, 2003) titled ‘Modelling Cropping Systems’. Since that special issue, the demands facing agricultural models have changed significantly. Global food security and climate change are large external drivers and the production context is more complicated, largely because of the greater demands from the natural resource management aspects of agricultural systems. This has driven many relevant developments in improving the modelling of these systems, their implementation as software programs, their inter-comparison in ensemble modelling, and their integration into larger frameworks. This Thematic Issue reflects on the drivers of change in agricultural systems in the last ten years and how the models have changed as a result. It describes these changes from a methodological, technical and application perspective, and suggests a research agenda for the future. Contributions are sought from process-based modelling groups around the world, dealing with agricultural systems in its various aspects.
Participation and Timelines
The Guest Editors would like to extend an open opportunity to the membership of iEMSs and the wider science community (e.g. AgMIP, MACSUR, GYGA, GEOGLAM) to participate in the development of the Thematic Issue, through either submitting or reviewing papers. Please feel free to promote the issue with colleagues unfamiliar with iEMSs and the journal EMS, noting for them that the journal has created a strong niche and has a rising Impact Factor of over 3.
Interested in Participation?
If you are interested in participating, please email your contact details and intended contribution (title, authors, abstract) to crop.modelling.ems@gmail.com by May 17, 2013. After an initial screening of abstracts, the EMS editorial system will be open for receiving full papers by September 30, 2013.
It is also envisaged that an open workshop will be conducted at the 4th AgMIP Annual Global Workshop to be held in New York in October 2013. This workshop will debate the alternative futures and upcoming challenges for crop models and will form the basis for the position paper for this Thematic Issue.
