Training Workshop for SAMARA Crop Model Users
A training workshop adressed to SAMARA crop model users had been held in Montpellier on March 2012, 5-9th. The workshop was organised by the PAM team and gathered about 20 ecophysiologists specialized in rice, sorghum or sugarcane. The main objectives of the worshop were (1) to present the new functionalities recently incorporated in the model, (2) to to make the participants autonomous and critical in their utilization of the model, and (3) to carry on a common reflexion on possible evolutions of the model.
The SAMARA crop model undertake tropical cultivated monocotyledones such as rice, sorghum and potentialy millet and sugarcane. The specificity of the model is to combine the principles of a classical crop model running at field level (derivative of SARRAH) and a functional structure plant model (derivative of ECOMERISTEM). The specificity of SAMARA is to provide an acurate understanding of the phenotypic plasticity of the plant at a population level. Therefore it can be an efficient decision support tool for breeders in their quest to improve the efficiency of their selection programmes.
During the workshop, the participants had to use their own experimental data generated by research projects including rice, sorghum and sugarcane (as mentionned above), and aiming at different goals such as to study the incidence of agrobiodiversity on farm resilience or to simulate the effects of climatic changes on crops.
The workshop had been carried out with the collaboration of IER (Mali), INTA (Argentina), AfricaRice (Sénégal), CCAFS-Activity1.2 (Philippines) and Hoheinheim University (Germany), with support of the Training Office of CIRAD.
Published: 23/03/2012