The Agricultural Model Exchange Initiative (AMEI) held a hybrid Development Sprint from 31 August to 4 September 2026. The event was organized in collaboration with the Laboratory of Ecophysiology of Plants under Environmental Stress (LEPSE) of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment (INRAE).
The sprint focused on advancing AMEI’s mission to improve the transparency, interoperability, reproducibility, and reuse of agricultural model components across modeling platforms. Participants worked in focused breakout groups and plenary discussions to advance several key activities, including soil temperature model intercomparison, potential and reference evapotranspiration model exchange, Crop2ML development, and workflows for improving model-component translation across programming languages and platforms.
A major focus of the sprint was the continued development and evaluation of soil temperature model components across multiple crop modeling platforms. Participants reviewed simulation progress for wheat experiments, discussed protocol updates, compared outputs, and identified next steps for improving cross-platform evaluation. The sprint also advanced work on evapotranspiration model components, including discussion of datasets, protocols, standalone drivers, and component extraction for future exchange and sensitivity analysis. In parallel, participants reviewed progress on Crop2ML tools and interfaces, including developments supporting model translation, metadata extraction, documentation, and interoperability. Throughout the week, breakout teams reported progress, discussed technical blockers, and identified priorities for continued development.
The University of Florida’s DSSAT cropping system model was one of the core platforms involved in the sprint. Other participating crop modeling platforms included SIMPLACE, SiriusQuality, STICS, and MONICA. The sprint brought together contributors from multiple regions, including the United States through the DSSAT team, France through INRAE and CIRAD, and Germany through ZALF and the University of Bonn.
The next AMEI Development Sprint is planned for January 2027. Learn more about the AMEI through the GitHub repository and Crop2ML.org.
