Plant Modeling and Its Applications to Agriculture

Abstract

While the world population is dramatically increasing, arable land is decreasing significantly in developing countries such as China. As a result, food security is and will be a primary concern, especially for developing countries with huge population and limited arable land resources. To sustain food supplies, it is urgent to conduct research towards a second green revolution, which will build high crop yields by means of developing super-high yield varieties and optimizing management practices. The functional-structural plant models have the potential to provide robust tools for designing crop ideotype and best management regimes. A functional-structural plant model is built up by integrating ecophysiological knowledge and plant structural growth dynamics. It can be used to simulate the resource acquisition, biomass production and partitioning in plants at organ, plant, and plant stand levels. Thus it can be used to design and optimize the morphological traits for new crop varieties so that they can capture resources (e.g. sunlight) more efficiently. Developing countries, such as China, are facing the problems of irrigation water shortage, low soil fertility, and abuse of inorganic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Optimized field management regimes are required to solve these troubles. And these management regimes can be achieved with simulation by plant models, which incorporate the function and structure of plant's aerial part and root system, coupling with micro-environmental models e.g. soil water and solute transportation models.