Colloquium on 02.03.2017.
Where: Building 45, Seminar room (Institute LSA)
Start: 10 a.m.
Dr. Simone Ugo Maria Bregaglio
(Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA)
Research Centre for Agriculture and Environment (AA) Italy) )
Including the impact of biotic stresses on crop yield to improve modelling capabilities
Considering the impact of plant pests and diseases on crop yield is needed to improve the model representations of agricultural systems. This is an acknowledged priority both in current climate and when future scenarios are used to forecast upcoming trends in crop productivity. Actions are required to fulfill this aim, such as making available input data at adequate spatial and temporal resolution and solving technical constraints which currently limit the coupling of epidemiological and crop models. Recently, international initiatives as MACSUR and AgMIP started to tackle these challenges, favoring the raise of a community of crop and plant disease modellers who collaborate to improve available tools. In this colloquium I will present a software framework called Diseases, which make available generic disease models to allow the dynamic coupling with crop models. The disease modelling domain is divided into four areas (i.e., inoculum development, disease progress, impacts on plants and agromanagement actions), each presenting a set of models that can be reused and extended with new approaches. I will show the main concepts and the implementation of Diseases, which follows the guidelines of the BioMA software framework. Case studies will be provided to present its field of application as well as the ongoing modelling activities.
