Webinar - Minimum Data requirements for Crop Modeling (18 June 2019)

Modelers are often frustrated because much of the research information available in crop data sets worldwide is either not in model-friendly format, or lacking key information to permit reliable simulations. On the other hand, when asked for minimum data sets, modelers typically provide rather exhaustive lists of information, much of which crop researchers do not collect on a routine basis, such as soil and water profiles, or hourly weather data. The Crop Modeling and AgMIP Communities aim to help bridge this ‘data gap’ by developing different classes of 'minimum' modeling data sets that are more realistic for researchers, permitting modeling to be performed at different levels of sophistication, while making far more of the crop data sets collected by researchers worldwide model friendly. Agreed standards for different levels of data comprehensiveness –corresponding to the degree of sophistication of modeling objectives- could form a basic guideline for the design of research, while offering new norms for funding organizations by which to evaluate added-value of research proposal outputs.