Dr. Rafael Battisti was recently selected as award for the Brazilian national prize "CAPES de TESE 2017" in the area of agricultural sciences for his dissertation, which he completed in 2016.
The prize, which will be presented on 7 December 2017 in Brasilia, is issued by CAPES, a foundation within the Ministry of Education in Brazil, and awarded to the nationwide best dissertations of the previous year in various (49) disciplines. A jury of the best professors of each program assesses the submitted works (2016: 146) according to the following criteria: originality, scientific importance, technological, cultural, social and innovative developments.
Dr. Rafael Battisti, a former guest scientist at the ZALF Institute of Landscape Systems Analysis in 2016, has recently defended his dissertation on "Calibration, uncertainties and use of soybean crop simulation models for evaluating strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change in Southern Brazil". In this, Battisti dealt with the simulation and modelling of management strategies for the cultivation of soybeans, one of the most important agricultural crops in Brazil, and compared different simulation models for this purpose.
During his guest stay, he worked with ZALF’s agricultural ecosystem model MONICA and adapted it to soybean cultivation under Brazilian conditions. He calibrated the model especially for the representation of the soybean’s root growth, to better depict its reaction to water stress and irrigation strategies. "Soybean production plays a major role in food security on a global scale," explains Dr. Claas Nendel, head of the Institute for Landscape System Analysis at ZALF. Rafael Battisti's works have been developed within the framework of German-Brazilian research collaboration between the ZALF and the agricultural college ESALQ of the University of São Paulo.
