SAMARA V2 is a deterministic cereal (except maize) crop model operating at daily time step. The current V2 version replaces the V1 of 2010-2011 which did not simulate flooded crops and corresponding water management, and it has numerous other improvements, so some of the parameter values will not be the same for a given genotype. A future version V3 will simulate photosynthesis in more detail (including CO2 response) and incorporate the phenology of RIDEV, a rice model considering organ temperature and microclimate. V3 will not replace V2 but rather, will serve as a specialized version for climate-change related studies.

SAMARA requires daily agro-meteorological weather data as input (Rg or hours of sunshine, Tmin, Tmax, RHmin, RHmax, daily mean wind speed, daily total rainfall), as well as hydrological top soil properties (volumetric water content of air-dry soil, at wilting point, at field capacity and at saturation = water logging; and percolation rate under flooded condition and soil depth as limit to the root front). SAMARA does not consider soil bulk density and swelling/shrinkage.

SAMARA is implemented as a modular system on the ECOTROP platform that also accommodates SARRAH Heinemann et al., 2008; Kouressy et al., 2008) and EcoPalm (Combres et al., 2012), programmed in Delphi language, and implemented under Windows.

It is freely available for non-commercial applications in research and education and can for that purpose be obtained from the authors. Direct downloads will be enabled soon on this site. The model has been developed between 2011 and 2014 with the partial material support of GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit: RISOCAS project) and CCAFS (CGIAR Research Programme for Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security), with the collaboration of IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) and several other laboratories.

Michael Dingkuhn (Cirad, IRRI), ecophysiologiste et modélisateur
Jean-Christophe Soulie (Cirad), informaticien
Richard Pasco (IRRI), informaticien
Myriam Adam (Cirad), ecophysiologiste et modélisatrice
Philippe Oriol (Cirad), agronomiste
Gregory Aguilar (Cirad), informaticien