Testing and Improving the WOFOST Model for Sunflower Simulation on Saline Soils of Inner Mongolia, China

Abstract

Monitoring and improving environmental stress in crops is vital for the sustainable development of agriculture and food security. Traditional experimental methods are costly and time-consuming, yet crop growth models focus mainly only on water and nutrient stresses. In this study, a new World Food Studies (WOFOST) model, WOFOST-ES, was developed by the addition of a general environmental stress factor (ES). To calibrate and validate WOFOST-ES, two-year micro-plot experiments and one-year field experiments with sunflower were conducted in the Hetao Irrigation District, China. The results of the micro-plot experiments indicated that the WOFOST model failed to simulate sunflower growth correctly but that the WOFOST-ES model was highly accurate in simulating both yield (R2 = 0.99, root mean square error (RMSE) = 56 kg/ha) and leaf area index (LAI) (R2 = 0.86, RMSE = 0.44). A statistical method for estimating ESs based on the dominant stress factor (salt at our study site) was also proposed as a supplemental tool for WOFOST-ES, and micro-plot and field experiments conducted in 2013 and 2017 both proved acceptable accuracy of the statistical method when using WOFOST-ES. Comparison between ESs and the water and salt stress factors of Feddes-type stress reduction functions indicated that ESs failed to reveal actual environmental stresses during the sunflower seeding stage but did reflect other environmental stresses in addition to water and salt during the bud, flowering, and maturity stages. Although the present WOFOST-ES model proved to be accurate, stable, and practical, future studies should be performed, focusing on the physical separation of ESs, their mechanistic quantification, and their evaluation at small time steps using more observations.

Impact of Air Pollution on Maize and Wheat Production

“…3). This phenomenon was similar to the effects of many other environmental stresses on crop growth [56][57][58][59][60]. For instance, Helms et al [61] found that soybean seedling emergence was seriously affected only when water stress lasted 12 days.…”

Review: Modeling the Effects of Salinity and Sodicity in Agricultural Systems

“…SWAP simulates plant growth through the integration of the WOFOST cropping model (de Wit et al., 2019; Kroes et al., 2017; Kroes & Supit, 2011). WOFOST does not, however, explicitly consider the effects of salinity as a limitation on plant growth, thereby limiting the integrated models ability to predict the effects of changing salinity on plant health (J. Zhu et al., 2018). Likewise, RZWQM2 integrates the DSSAT model for plant growth, but the version of DSSAT used by RZWQM2 does not include the effects of salinity (Jones et al., 2003).…”

Development and validation of a sunflower crop growth module for the Daisy model

“…For this reason, crop modeling has increased appreciably in recent decades (Murthy, 2004;Di Paola et al, 2016). In general, many models have been developed for simulating the soil-plant system, some of them are based on soil hydrology, such as HYDRUS and SWAT, which just consider the environmental stress (water, nutrients, and heat), and many others are based on the physiology of plants (such as APSIM and WOFOST), which consider the crop growth process and pay less attention to the applied stress on plants (Zhu et al, 2018). The plant growth modeling requires the initial parameters of the plants as inputs.…”