Crop growth and soil water fluxes at erosion‐affected arable sites: Using weighing lysimeter data for model intercomparison

Abstract

Agroecosystem models need to reliably simulate all biophysical processes that control crop growth, particularly the soil water fluxes and nutrient dynamics. As a result of the erosion history, truncated and colluvial soil profiles coexist in arable fields. The erosion-affected field-scale soil spatial heterogeneity may limit agroecosystem model predictions. The objective was to identify the variation in the importance of soil properties and soil profile modifications in agroecosystem models for both agronomic and environmental performance. Four lysimeters with different soil types were used that cover the range of soil variability in an erosion-affected hummocky agricultural landscape. Twelve models were calibrated on crop phenological stages, and model performance was tested against observed grain yield, aboveground biomass, leaf area index, actual evapotranspiration, drainage, and soil water content. Despite considering identical input data, the predictive capability among models was highly diverse. Neither a single crop model nor the multi-model mean was able to capture the observed differences between the four soil profiles in agronomic and environmental

Testing the EPIC Richards submodel for simulating soil water dynamics under different bottom boundary conditions

“…In the recent comparison of the performances of 12 models made by Groh et al. (2020), models that used Richards‐based methods achieved better results in terms of SWC and net water flux at the lysimeter bottom than models that did not integrate them. Moreover, this study further validated our methodology by emphasizing the importance of lysimeters for providing the necessary soil‐related data for testing soil–vegetation–atmospheric models.…”

“…Recently, Shelia et al (2018) reported that integrating the HYDRUS-1D model into DSSAT provided better SWCs compared with the tipping bucket method, despite the appearance of submodel discrepancies from crop variables. In the recent comparison of the performances of 12 models made by Groh et al (2020), models that used Richards-based methods achieved better results in terms of SWC and net water flux at the lysimeter bottom than models that did not integrate them. Moreover, this study further validated our methodology by emphasizing the importance of lysimeters for providing the necessary soil-related data for testing soil-vegetationatmospheric models.…”

How will future climate depending agronomic management impact the yield risk of wheat cropping systems? A regional case study of Eastern Denmark

“…The winter wheat module used builds on the default winter wheat parameterization in DAISY, which has been used in several articles, providing good correspondence between measured and simulated values of biomass production and N dynamics (Abrahamsen and Hansen, 2000), crop production, soil water fluxes and nutrient dynamics (Hansen et al, 1990;Diekkrüger et al, 1995;Groh et al, 2020), and yield estimates (Palosuo et al, 2011;Ozturk et al, 2017). A new parametrization of winter wheat was recently presented by Gyldengren et al (2020), based on recent experimental data from Eastern Denmark.…”

Transdisciplinary contributions and opportunities in soil physical hydrology

“…A major shortcoming that limits the validity of agroecosystem models is not accurately capturing this heterogeneity Vrugt et al, 2003). Groh et al (2020) investigate the response of different agroecosystem models to a range of different soil profiles and input information. Above-and belowground processes are simulated for soils representing heterogeneity in a typical hummocky agricultural landscape with growing crops.…”