52 research outputs found
Coupling easily numerical models using the VSoil modelling platform
No full textInternational audienceLocated at the interface between the groundwater table and the atmosphere, soil lies at the core of the critical zone. It is a complex, dynamic environment sustaining essential ecosystemic services and biodiversity. Numerical simulation models of soil processes are invaluable tools for tackling the complex issues involved in understanding and predicting physical, chemical and biological cycles, in relation to agricultural production, soil protection and adaptation to climate change. To provide a detailed representation of soil functioning, it is necessary to couple a large number of models that represent the various processes taking place within it. Modelling platforms help to do this by facilitating the development and use of coupled models of soil processes. A key requirement of such platforms is to be able to integrate existing, already validated, models without major difficulties.To this aim, we present the VSoil modelling software platform (https://vsoil.hub.inrae.fr/) developed at INRAE (France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment) since 2009 in close collaboration between scientists and software engineers. VSoil is an open-source platform designed to aid the development of numerical models at the soil profile scale describing physical, chemical and biological processes in soil and its interactions with climate and plants but also anthropic activities. The user-friendly workflow of VSoil simplifies the development and use of models, making them accessible even to scientists with limited experience in computer programming. The VSoil software suite comes with a range of already developed models and is designed to guide users as much as possible in addressing their scientific questions, by providing tools for: i) defining and describing pertinent soil processes and their interactions through their input and output variables, ii) developing elementary models, called modules, which are numerical representations of the processes, iii) assembling and coupling these modules into more or less complex models, and iv) parametrising and executing the resulting models, and visualising results. The VSoil team provides user support and regularly adds new features to meet the needs of the user community. VSoil currently offers key features, including: i) model exploration tools (sensitivity analysis and parameter estimation) along with the ability to run models on several sets of input data, ii) the possibility to run models, in a reproducible way, on a remote computing environment (server or cluster), iii) the connection to INRAE's national agroclimatic database. VSoil fosters collaboration between scientists from various disciplines and facilitates the sharing and use of new developments within the platform's user community.VSoil is being used by scientists from various countries to address very diverse questions such as the fate of persistent fluorinated pollutants in soils, the impact of treated wastewater on soil, the use of geophysics for non-destructive characterisation of soil hydraulic properties, the fate of pesticides at the landscape level, the simulation of soil carbon dynamics, or the optimisation of forestry machinery operations to mitigate soil degradation and compaction
Considering the effects of soil carbon on soil volume change in process based modelling of soil evolution
No full textInternational audienc
Considering the effects of soil carbon on soil volume change in process based modelling of soil evolution
No full textInternational audienc
QualiTree, a virtual fruit tree to study the management of fruit quality. I. Model development
Full text linkInternational audienceThis article presents QualiTree, a generic fruit tree model that can simulate the effects of various cultivation practices on the development and within-tree variability of fruit quality. These practices include fruit thinning, summer and winter pruning, irrigation and tree training. Combining both agronomic and physiology viewpoints, the model describes the tree as a set of objects—fruiting units organised into a tree architecture and viewed in detail, and other compartments viewed globally—that exchange carbon and are the targets of physiological functions that can be changed by cultivation practices. The complex effect of shoot removal on tree behaviour was subjected to a special modelling effort using the coordination theory. QualiTree combines existing models of fruit quality development and simple carbon allocation functions. Though parsimonious, it is able to express a high degree of variability of fruit quality criteria. Future developments of QualiTree relative to an extension of the range of fruit quality criteria and the effects of cultivation practices are also discusse
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