BioCro - My new favorite crop model

Hey there

I'm really sorry for disappearing for weeks, but I needed to stay focused on some of my works and get them done.

Here and in this post I will be talking about my new favorite crop model which accidently it has been developed by my major adviser too ;)

No I'm just kidding, I really feel comfortable with this model and it's all because of the fact that it’s being ran in R.

BioCro actually, is a “R” package and it comprises lots of functions and data for plant and crop modeling (https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/biocro/). It has been developed by Fernando Miguez couple of years ago and he is still trying to debug and improve the model.

In general there are different functions in the package like MaizeGro and BioGro which they simulate photosynthesis for C4 crops and plants. Fernando has tried to keep the models as mechanistic as it's possible.

Here is a part of documentation on how the BioGro model works:

" It simulates dry biomass growth during an entire growing season. It represents an integration of the photosynthesis function c4photo, canopy evapo/transpiration CanA, the multilayer canopy model sunML and a dry biomass partitioning calendar and senescence. It also considers carbon and nitrogen cycles and water and nitrogen limitations." .This model also is able to simulate the light microenvironment in the canopy based on the sunlit-shade model and the multiple layers.

As I said earlier, since, this model basically has been developed and runs in "R", it let you to get access to every single piece of its code.

You also have this option to put these functions in very sophisticated optimization, sensitivity analysis and uncertainty analysis and make sure that your model works as well as it is supposed to.

Last but not the least, the whole models in package work in hourly time step and it let you to study and simulate different phenomena in soil and crop in smaller time step than the other models which mostly they are daily. Since this past August, I was working on building a new model or sub-module for BioCro package for simulation of soil respiration. I just hope we would be able to release the new version encompassing soil respiration in next few months.

That’s all I wanted to say. Let me know if you wanted to try the package, I will be always willing to share everything that I know and help you with the process.