Abstract
It is the aim of this study to analyse how different crop growth model routines affect the simulation of water flow and nitrogen transport of a crop rotation in agricultural fields. The model system Expert-N is briefly described and used to test the crop growth sub-models against data of a six-year field experiment on sandy soils. Expert-N is a modular soil–plant–atmosphere model system, which comprises different sub-models to simulate one-dimensional vertical transport of water, solute and heat in the unsaturated zone. It includes several sub-models to describe organic matter turnover and has three generic crop growth sub-models. The latter are derived from the crop models CERES, SPASS and SUCROS. Simulations were performed using the different sub-models for each of the cereal crops in the sugar beet, winter wheat, winter barley, winter rye crop rotation. Results show the impact of crop model choice on simulated water balances and turnover of C and N. It is concluded that the simulation of root growth and plant residue mineralisation needs some improvement.
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Acknowledgements
This research was partially supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre 607 “Growth and Parasite Defense: Competition for Resources in Economic Plants from Agronomy and Forestry”. The experimental dataset provided by the Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape and Land Use Research is gratefully acknowledged. We also thank the anonymous reviewer for his comments that helped to considerably improve the manuscript.
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Priesack, E., Gayler, S. & Hartmann, H.P. The impact of crop growth sub-model choice on simulated water and nitrogen balances. Nutr Cycl Agroecosyst 75, 1–13 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10705-006-9006-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10705-006-9006-1