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.