FARMs: A Geospatial Crop Modeling and Agricultural Water Management System

Abstract

To ensure agricultural sustainability and desirable environmental outcomes, stakeholders need systems-based model-driven decision support tools. The objective of this study was to develop a global scale web-based geospatial crop modeling application called Food, Agriculture, and Resource Management system (FARMs), to simplify the application of the crop simulation model —Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) without requiring users to create input weather, climate, and soil files. FARMs was built based on open source Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies and DSSAT to allow for adaptive management through its ability to perform in-season yield predictions for alfalfa and maize, currently. Validation of FARMs against variety trial data in California was acceptable between measured and simulated yields for alfalfa. The work done in this study showed how a complex model like DSSAT can be translated into a useable web-based decision support tool for near-real-time simulation with the help of open-source GIS technologies.

The LANDSUPPORT geospatial decision support system (S‐DSS) vision: Operational tools to implement sustainability policies in land planning and management

“…1. Agriculture and forestry applications: including irrigation (Bonfante et al, 2019;Zhao et al, 2022), olive growing (Manna et al, 2020), viticulture (Terribile et al, 2017), forest planning and management (Marano et al, 2019;Povak et al, 2020) and crop planning and management (Kim & Kisekka, 2021).…”

“…We do not aim to provide a literature review of geoSpatial DSSs here, but we do wish to highlight the fact that, in recent years, there has been great progress towards the development of operational S‐DSS tools using similar GCI infrastructure applied to for example: Agriculture and forestry applications: including irrigation (Bonfante et al, 2019; Zhao et al, 2022), olive growing (Manna et al, 2020), viticulture (Terribile et al, 2017), forest planning and management (Marano et al, 2019; Povak et al, 2020) and crop planning and management (Kim & Kisekka, 2021). Environmental protection: including soil conservation (Terribile et al, 2015), water contamination (Lan et al, 2020), risk assessment (Kijewski‐Correa et al, 2020), land take (Langella et al, 2020; Manna et al, 2017) and pesticide leaching (Bancheri et al, 2022) and, finally, ecotourism (Mileti et al, 2022).…”

Irrigation Decision Support Systems (IDSS) for California’s Water–Nutrient–Energy Nexus

“…FARMs allows adaptive management to perform in-season yield predictions using both weather and climatic data to evaluate the potential impacts of management decisions on end-of-season yield. FARMs uses NASA POWER weather data integrated through an API [153]. FARMs simulates nitrogen cycling of the cropping systems and quantifies crop N stress based on nitrogen uptake versus available nitrogen and is expressed as a range between 0 (no stress) to 1 (maximum stress).…”