PlaSMo: Making existing crop and plant growth models easily available to the wider scientific and policy making communities

摘要

There are already in existence many published mathematical models of plant and crop growth. These models typically cover specific organs, whole plants, even landscapes and often allow responses to actual meteorological data to be simulated. As such they provide a ready vehicle for modellers working at other scales to incorporate their models with and evaluate their impact at larger or smaller scales. The plant and crop models also provide a source of validated submodels that can be reused in other existing models or to create new ones. The problem is that many of (these older models are either in legacy formats, not easily available or not fully documented and so are in danger of being lost. The PIaSMo project has been set-up with the explicit aim of converting these models into a standardised open format (in XML) that will provide future proofed full descriptions of the models such that users could implement them unambiguously in a computational environment of their choice. The models will then be made freely available from a specifically designed portal that enables users to download them, post comments on them and upload modified versions. To facilitate the conversion of the models to XML they are being reimplemented in the modelling program Simile. This program's graphical representation of the models provides an intuitive representation of their structure which is easy for non-modellers to understand, manipulate and run simulations from. Simile can export the XML versions of the models as well as reload and run them. However, the XML version of the model could be run on any package or web application designed to read the XML code. Examples will be given of the lessons learned in converting models into a graphical (declarative) representation.