During the week of January 8-12, 2024, the 20th DSSAT Development Sprint was held in a “Hybrid” format. The DSSAT Development Sprint was hosted by Global Food Systems Institute & Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering of the University of Florida. In-person participants included one representatives from the University of Kentucky, seventeen representatives from the University of Florida, one representative from CIAT (Kenya), one representative from Columbia University, one representative from CIMMYT (Mexico), and one representative from USDA-ARS, while there were 22 on-line participants from the USA, Brazil, Denmark, Kenya, Thailand, South Africa, Germany, Türkiye, Spain, South Korea, Italy, Pakistan, Costa Rica, and Spain.
This event was a five-day crop modeling hackathon where participants worked together to enhance the science behind crop models, data preparation, analytics, as well as the development and refinement of the crop modeling tools and applications. Significant advancements were made in several areas, including the enhancement of new tools such as XB2, GLUE2, GSSAT2,SoilPro, the Time Series Estimator (TSE), and the Crop Rotation tool. Key developments included a conceptual inter-cropping model based on components from the Cropping System Model (CSM), improvements to the Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) routine, water logging routines, 2-D soil water and nitrogen balance, the integration of ozone impact on various crops, soil temperature simulation enhancements, disease modeling advancements, incorporating nitrogen dynamics into the CANEGRO module, and numerous other initiatives.
