Mourad Latati: Design and co-evaluation of innovative cropping systems: Modelling approaches

Soil-crop models are widely used as tools to evaluate the combined effects of cropping practices, soil management and climate on the agro-environmental indicators and agroecosystem performance. They provide a wide range of predictive information that is useful to design and co-evaluate innovative cropping systems (i.e. crop rotation, cover crop and intercropping) that are more sustainable and resilient face to water and resources stress. However, modeling diversified crops is still under development to better take into account the various interactions between crops, while this was particular noted in case of intercropping. The present project targets the calibration and validation of the new version of the STICS soil-crop model (STICS-intercrop) recently improved to simulate consistently a wide range of bi-specific annual intercrops. The main objective will aim to test and evaluate this new version on two (i.e. chickpea-durum wheat and forage pea-barley intercropping) legume-based intercropping systems that are commonly practiced by Algerian farmers under contrasted pedoclimatic and cropping practices conditions. The new version of STIC will be tested according to the following steps (i) first evaluation (without parameterization) for sole cropped species by using existing data on both legumes and cereals in monoculture; (ii) parameterization within the collected data on monoculture system and then (iii) direct validation to evaluate the prediction on intercropping system without re-parameterization. The relevance and validity domain for simulating intercropping by the new version of STICS will be compared to results obtained using the previous standard version of STICS (V9.1, 2, V10, 10.1…).