Agro-Environmental Systems (AES)

In 2012 the ESM team made good progress with the structural improvement and development of several EPIC model implementations at the European, African and global scale.  

corn crop

corn crop

European, African, and global EPIC modeling: Progress and outlook 

The EPIC team made good progress with the structural improvement and development of several EPIC implementations at European, African and Global scale with relevance for projects such as Carbo-Extreme, ISAC, and GEOSAF. It is essential that a crop model's performance be thoroughly evaluated against reported crop yields and production. For example, the organic matter associated with crop production provides the main influx of carbon into arable soil.

In 2012, for Europe, the major crops were validated against historically reported regional yield data for the major crops (Balkovic et al., in review). The global setup is in progress, and our approach integrates the most complete global information on crop cultivation currently available: i) global crop calendar data by Sacks et al. (2011;) ii) global wheat yields and harvested areas for the years 1997–2003 published by Monfreda et al. (2008); iii) average N, P, and K fertilizer application rates provided by Mueller et al. (2012; in a collaborative effort); iv) data on irrigated and rainfed wheat areas published by Portmann et al. (2010). 

EPIC simulations validated global wheat and validated European rye.


Selected project activity: EU project “LC-IMPACT”

A goal of the LC-IMPACT project, was to develop spatially explicit quantitative expressions of the impact of erosion on the environment caused by the crop cultivation intervention in the ecosystem: so-called characterization factors (CFs). More


Print this page

Last edited: 07 November 2013

CONTACT DETAILS

Michael Obersteiner

Principal Research Scholar Exploratory Modeling of Human-natural Systems Research Group - Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Selected AES project activity, 2012

Related Models

EPIC

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313