About perennial crops

#1

Hello,
I would like to open a discussion about Aquacrop and perennial crops,

As i understand it, the model has not been made to take into consideration the complex biomass partition patterns that may be encountered in perennial crops, especially perennial fruit trees.
However, some authors seem to obtain results that are quite fine with Aquacrop despite this limitation.

A few exemples include:

  • Qin et al. 2016, Exploring optimal fertigation strategies for orange production, using soil–crop modelling, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2016.02.025 (for which used parameters should be in the supp. data, that are behind the editor’s paywall so i can’t access it)
  • Rallo et al. 2012, Assessing AQUACROP water stress function to evaluate the transpiration reductions of olive mature tree
  • Bloemen et al. 2017, Water use of a multigenotype poplar short-rotation coppice from tree to stand scale, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.12345

My (naive) question is the following : given these examples, to what extent do you think it is possible to adapt some parameters and/or this open sourced code to be able to run simulations suitable for tree species ?

Thanks in advance,
J.

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#2

Hi @jeremy.lavarenne

Its an interesting question and would be a really cool extension to the model. Since a good chunk of the model is just simulating the soil-water balance, I think it would be potentially possible for someone to adapt the crop transpitation/biomass and yield growth components to perennial crops. Its not a major priority for me at the moment im afraid (nor do i think i am best place to figure out how to do it as I am more of a programmer/data scientist than agronomist/crop modeller). If anyone could propose a good way of doing it in the future (and verify it on some experimental data), we could definately think about incorperating it.

Thanks
Tom

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