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Concepts and Applications of AquaCrop: The FAO Crop Water Productivity Model

OAR@ICRISAT

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/7045/
 
Title Concepts and Applications of AquaCrop: The FAO Crop Water Productivity Model
 
Creator Steduto, P
Raes, D
Hsiao, T C
Fereres, E
Heng, L K
Howell, T A
Evett, S R
Rojas-Lara, B A
Farahan, H J
Izzi, G
Oweis, T Y
Wani, S P
Hoogeveen, J
Geerts, S
 
Subject Watershed management
Agriculture-Farming, Production, Technology, Economics
 
Description Predicting attainable yield under water-limiting conditions is an important goal in arid, semi-arid and drought-prone environments. To address this task, FAO has developed a model, AquaCrop, which simulates attainable yields of the major herbaceous crops in response to water. Compared to other models, AquaCrop has a significantly smaller number of parameters and attempts to strike a balance between simplicity, accuracy, and robustness. Root zone water content is simulated by keeping track of incoming and outgoing water fluxes. Instead of leaf area index, AquaCrop uses canopy ground cover. Canopy expansion, stomatal conductance, canopy senescence, and harvest index are the key physiological processes which respond to water stress. Low and high temperature stresses on pollination and harvestable yield are considered, as is cold temperature stress on biomass production. Evapotranspiration is simulated separately as crop transpiration and soil evaporation and the daily transpiration is used to calculate the biomass gain via the normalized biomass water productivity. The normalization is for atmospheric evaporative demand and carbon dioxide concentration, to make the model applicable to diverse locations and seasons, including future climate scenarios. AquaCrop accommodates fertility levels and water management systems, including rainfed, supplemental, deficit, and full irrigation. Simulations are routinely in thermal time, but can be carried out in calendar time. Future versions will incorporate salt balance and capillary raise. AquaCrop is aimed at users in extension services, consulting firms, governmental agencies, NGOs, farmers associations and irrigation districts, as well as economists and policy analysts in need of crop models for planning and assessing water needs and use of projects and regions.
 
Publisher Springer
 
Date 2013
 
Type Book Section
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
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Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/7045/1/ConceptandApplication_wani-2013.pdf
Steduto, P and Raes, D and Hsiao, T C and Fereres, E and Heng, L K and Howell, T A and Evett, S R and Rojas-Lara, B A and Farahan, H J and Izzi, G and Oweis, T Y and Wani, S P and Hoogeveen, J and Geerts, S (2013) Concepts and Applications of AquaCrop: The FAO Crop Water Productivity Model. In: Crop Modeling and Decision Support. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 175-191. ISBN 978-3-642-01132-0