APES - Agricultural Production and Externalities Simulator

APES Online Documentation

General Documentation

APES - Agricultural Production and Externalties Simulator
Several simulation tools allow studying the impact of agricultural management on production activities in specific environments. Such tools are specialized, to different extents, to specific production activities: arable crops/cropping systems, grassland, orchards, agroforestry, livestock etc. more...

Models

		AbioticDamages (code documentation) The AbioticDamage component contains models to estimate abiotic damage on crops. Each typology of damage (e.g. frost, ozone) consists of one or more models which use their data-type and specific interface. more...

		AgroChemicals (code documentation) The AgrochemicalsFate component is a one-dimension model that simulates the pesticide fate at field scale with daily time step but it needs information about field size to estimate the drift. The model considers 5 compartments where pesticide is stored: canopy surface, plant, available fraction of the soil, aged fraction of the soil and bound fraction of the soil. more...

		AgroManagement (code documentation) The goal of many agricultural modeling studies is to quantify the impact of agricultural management on production and system externalities. Agricultural management must be simulated in such a way to mimic as closely as possible farmers’ behavior. more...

		AirTemperature (code documentation) AirT is a cross-platform component containing routines to generate long-term series of air temperature values using existing daily or monthly minimum and maximum temperature records. Alternative approaches are implemented for generating daily values of maximum and minimum air temperature. more...

		FieldManager (code documentation) The Field manager is a simple component aimed at providing information about the field dimensions and structure (rows of plants with cultivated strips). Three field configurations are currently available: a configuration for a single crop, a configuration for a continuous row of grape vines, and a configuration with a row of woody trees and a crop strip... more...

		Crop (code documentation) Crop growth depends on the interception of radiation by green plant parts and its conversion into dry matter. Crop development goes through a number of different phenological stages, comprising the vegetative stage and the reproductive stage ending in crop maturity and a harvestable product, and depends on a physiological time, usually expressed as a temperature sum. more...

		CropML (code documentation) JRC.IPSC.MARS.Crop.CropML is a software component implementing several approaches to model crop development and growth. Models are implemented using a fine granularity, and they are also used in composite structures which can used as simulation models in applications. The model currently being implemented using this criterion is WARM. more...

		EvapoTranspiration (code documentation) ET is a cross-platform component containing routines to estimate daily and hourly values of evapotranspiration from the reference surface, according to alternative approaches. The reference surface for daily computation is, according to the FAO Expert Consultation on Revision of FAO Methodologies for Crop Water Requirements, "a hypothetical grass reference crop with an assumed crop height of 0.12 m, a fixed surface resistance of 70 s m-1 and an albedo of 0.23". more...
		LeafWetness (code documentation) LeafWetness is a software library containing different models to estimate hourly values of leaf wetness according to alternative approaches. Leaf wetness duration is a driving variable in epidemiological models for simulating risk of yield losses due to plant diseases. more...

		LightInterception (code documentation) INRA.LightInterception is a stand alone component developped for the APES model of the SEAMLESS European Project FP6. It purpose is to partitionate the daily solar light between plants and soil. more...

		Rain (code documentation) Rain is a cross-platform component containing routines to generate long-term series of precipitation values using parameters from existing daily or monthly precipitation records. Precipitation includes the amount of rainfall and snowfall. If the mean air temperature of the day is below freezing, all of the generated precipitation is regarded as snow, otherwise all of the precipitation is rain. more...

		RootGrowth (code documentation) INRA.RootDistribution is a stand alone component developed for the APES model of the SEAMLESS European Project FP6. It purpose is to split the plant root growth through different the soil layers. more...

		SoilNitrogen (code documentation) SoilNitrogen is a stand alone Net component, specifically developed in the Seamless project framework,as a component of the Agricultural Production and Externalities Simulator (APES). Apes is a modular simulation system targeted at estimating the biophysical behavior of agricultural production systems in response to the interaction of weather and different options of agro-technical management. more...

		SoilRunoffErosion (code documentation) RunoffErosion is a stand alone Net component, specifically developed in the Seamless project framework,as a component of the Agricultural Production and Externalities Simulator (APES). Apes is a modular simulation system targeted at estimating the biophysical behavior of agricultural production systems in response to the interaction of weather and different options of agro-technical management. more...

		SoilTemperature (code documentation) The SoilTemperature component uses the Parton method to estimate soil surface temperature. The temperature profile is calculated by solving the differential equation of heat propagation, after estimating specific heat and heat conductivity from soil water content, organic matter, and... more...

		SoilWater (code documentation) SoilWater is a stand alone component with its own data-type and related interfaces, so it is reusable in different backgrounds. The SoilWater component offers a wide range of alternative methods to perform the simulation. more...

		SolarRadiation (code documentation) GSRad is a cross-platform component containing routines to calculate daily and hourly values of extra-terrestrial and ground-level global solar radiation. The latter is both generated using stochastic approaches or estimated by means of physical relationships between solar radiation and other weather variables (i.e. air temperature, sunshine duration, cloud cover). more...

		Vineyard (code documentation) INRA.Tree is a stand alone C# component developed for the APES model of the SEAMLESS European Project FP6. It purpose is to simulate perennial plant growth, production and product quality (either for woody tree or vine or orchards). more...

		WaterUptake (code documentation) INRA.WaterUptake is a stand alone component developed for the APES model of the SEAMLESS European Project FP6. It purpose is to split the plant water demand through the different soil layers, it also manage plant competition for soil water. more...

		Wind (code documentation) Wind is a cross-platform component containing routines to generate long-term series of wind speed values using parameters from existing wind speed records. Generating mean daily wind speed involves stochastic processes, followed by estimation of maximum and minimum wind speed for each day. more...

Tools

		GDD - Graphic Data Display Providing data views via graphical user interfaces is a common need for every application built to make use of models. If model output is generated by a modular system in which model components are interchangeable, output variables may change, thus maintaining such graphical user interfaces can be challenging and resource demanding. more...

		MPE - Model Parameters Editor Developing and maintaining a simulation system implies, among other things, that the parameters used can change. Composite models are made of simpler model, which can be often interchanged by alternative formulations. This means that the development and management of a simulation system may require the ability to deal with the fact that the number and type of the parameters of the composite model may change, each time a sub model is substituted. more...
		CLIMA - Weather Generator CLIMA is a modular weather generator which uses the components AirTemperature, EvapoTranspiration, LeafWetness, Rain, SolarRadiation, and Wind to allow generation/estiamtion of weather data using alternate approaches. It also allow composising ad hoc software libraries. more...

		SOE - Simulation Output Evaluator The Simulation Output Evaluator is a data analysis tool designed to provide easy access to model evaluation techniques. Whether the literature gives neither a standard theory on model evaluation, nor a standard 'box of tools'; the emphasis is here given on statistical techniques, to be applied to comparing estimates either estimates against measurements, or two series of estimates, making use of an extensible library called IRENE (the .NET 2.0 version). more...

		ACG - AgroManagement Configuration Generator The AgroManagement Configuration Generator is an application to build XML files containing a set of planned agricultural management actions. Such files can be used by the CRA.AgroManagement component at run time to simulate the decision making process to implement agro-management actions in a field. more...

		DCC - Domain Classes Coder The Domain Classes Coder (DCC)is a Windows application to generate C# and VB.NET (.NET 2.0 platform) code to be used as domain classes containing values and attributes for each variable used to model a given domain. Attributes are set via the type VarInfo, which implements a set of attributes to describe a variable: Name, Description, MaxValue, MinValue, DefaultValue, Units, Type, URL. more...

		MCE - Model Component Explorer The Model Component Explorer (MCE) is a Window application to visualize the interfaces and the ontology of components developed according to the design proposed by Donatelli and Rizzoli. The design uses domain classes to make the component interface semantically rich; MCE allows identifying domain classes, the attributes of each variable, and the signature of each interface model. Also, for each model implemented, MCE allows identifying inputs, parameters (if any), outputs, and associated models (if any). MCE also shows the dependencies of each component. more...

Utilities

		ClimIndices (code documentation) ClimIndices is a component containing routines to calculate weather indicators from multi-year series of daily weather data. Basic indicators are computed as simple statistics on weather inputs (yearly series of daily precipitation, maximum and minimum air temperatures, incoming solar radiation, and reference evapotranspiration). Other indicators are derived, grouped into six classes: dates, counts, thermal sums, water, waves and indices. more...

		IRENE - Integrated Resources for Evaluating Numerical Estimates (code documentation) IRENE (Integrated Resources for Evaluating Numerical Estimates .NET) is a component containing routines to evaluate model performance. Basic statistics are computed for both estimates and measured data. Several validation metrics (simple or composite) are implemented to compare model estimates against measured data (difference-based indices and association-based statistics). more...


		MassBalance (code documentation) The computation of mass balance in simulation models is a desirable feature to demonstrate that the law of mass conservation is respected both in the modelling solution chosen and in its implementation in a discrete software unit. When the modelling solution is a composition of several components, and more in general when composing different model modules to simulate a system, the computation of mass balance becomes an extremely useful feature both during the phase of development of the modelling solution, and during its use with diverse input sets. more...
		Optimizer (code documentation) Optimizer is a library allowing to use and extend both solvers and objective functions. It exposes an interface to build adapter to models. The software development kit includes a sample GUI and a controller component, the facilitate the development of custom GUIs. more...

		PTF - PedoTransfer Functions (code documentation) PTF (PedoTransfer Functions) is a software component to estimate both soil water content and saturated hydraulic conductivity by means of alternative pedotransfer functions. The modelling background is essentially based on the approaches published in Pachepsky and Rawls (2004). more...

		Preconditions (code documentation) The CRA.Core.Preconditions assembly is .NET 2.0 a component developed to make numeric tests of pre- and post-conditions having as main target software components implementing agro-ecological models. Pre-conditions and post-conditions are not only useful, when tested, to get all the advantages of the design-by-contract approach, but they are also an essential part of model documentation. more...

		SensitivityAnalysis (code documentation) SensitivityAnalysis is a component developed with the goal of making available the sensitivity analysis models implemented in the Simlab library via a user friendly application programming interface. more...
		SoilReader (code documentation) CRA.Soil.SoilReader is a component to read from a data source soil parameters, soil data, and values to initialize soil state variables. The component allows loading a variable number of parameters/variables, and the original set of variables defined can be extended. more...

		WeatherReader (code documentation) The WeatherReader component has two functions: 1) to provide an estimate for missing weather data, and 2) to provide access at run time to site and weather data. more...