Agricultural science is a broad multidisciplinary field of biology that encompasses the parts of exact, natural, economic and social sciences that are used in the practice and understanding of agriculture. Professionals of the agricultural science are called agricultural scientists or agriculturists.
Agroecology is an applied science that studies ecological processes applied to agricultural production systems. Bringing ecological principles to bear can suggest new management approaches in agroecosystems. The term is often used imprecisely, as the term can be used as a science, a movement, or an agricultural practice. Agroecologists study a variety of agroecosystems. The field of agroecology is not associated with any one particular method of farming, whether it be organic, regenerative, integrated, or industrial, intensive or extensive, although some use the name specifically for alternative agriculture.
A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations and planning levels of an organization and help people make decisions about problems that may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance—i.e. unstructured and semi-structured decision problems. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized or human-powered, or a combination of both.
Nutrient management is the science and practice directed to link soil, crop, weather, and hydrologic factors with cultural, irrigation, and soil and water conservation practices to achieve optimal nutrient use efficiency, crop yields, crop quality, and economic returns, while reducing off-site transport of nutrients (fertilizer) that may impact the environment. It involves matching a specific field soil, climate, and crop management conditions to rate, source, timing, and place of nutrient application.
The Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) is open-source software for building climate, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, and other Earth science software applications. These applications are computationally demanding and usually run on supercomputers. The ESMF is considered a technical layer, integrated into a sophisticated common modeling infrastructure for interoperability. Other aspects of interoperability and shared infrastructure include: common experimental protocols, common analytic methods, common documentation standards for data and data provenance, shared workflow, and shared model components.
Component-based software engineering (CBSE), also called component-based development (CBD), is a branch of software engineering that emphasizes the separation of concerns with respect to the wide-ranging functionality available throughout a given software system. It is a reuse-based approach to defining, implementing and composing loosely coupled independent components into systems. This practice aims to bring about an equally wide-ranging degree of benefits in both the short-term and the long-term for the software itself and for organizations that sponsor such software.
Gianni Bellocchi is a researcher in agricultural and related sciences. He is credited with the development of approaches and tools in validation of estimates and measurements. Introduction of fuzzy logic in the context of validation is often considered to be the most significant contribution to the field of model and method validation.
An ecosystem model is an abstract, usually mathematical, representation of an ecological system, which is studied to better understand the real system.
Spot blotch is a leaf disease of wheat caused by Cochliobolus sativus. Cochliobolus sativus also infects other plant parts and in conjunction with other pathogens causes common root rot and black point.
The Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS) deals with the Earth's surface and the observable and projected changes constantly taking place – the ever-changing dynamic interface between lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere and atmosphere.
Common modeling infrastructure refers to software libraries that can be shared across multiple institutions in order to increase software reuse and interoperability in complex modeling systems. Early initiatives were in the climate and weather domain, where software components representing distinct physical domains tended to be developed by domain specialists, often at different organizations. In order to create complete applications, these needed to be combined, using for instance a general circulation model, that transfers data between different components. An additional challenge is that these models generally require supercomputers to run, to account for the collected data and for data analyses. Thus, it was important to provide an efficient massively parallel computer system, and the processing hardware and software, to account for all the different workloads and communication channels.
Deficit irrigation (DI) is a watering strategy that can be applied by different types of irrigation application methods. The correct application of DI requires thorough understanding of the yield response to water and of the economic impact of reductions in harvest. In regions where water resources are restrictive it can be more profitable for a farmer to maximize crop water productivity instead of maximizing the harvest per unit land. The saved water can be used for other purposes or to irrigate extra units of land. DI is sometimes referred to as incomplete supplemental irrigation or regulated DI.
Environmental informatics is the science of information applied to environmental science. As such, it provides the information processing and communication infrastructure to the interdisciplinary field of environmental sciences aiming at data, information and knowledge integration, the application of computational intelligence to environmental data as well as the identification of environmental impacts of information technology. The UK Natural Environment Research Council defines environmental informatics as the "research and system development focusing on the environmental sciences relating to the creation, collection, storage, processing, modelling, interpretation, display and dissemination of data and information." Kostas Karatzas defined environmental informatics as the "creation of a new 'knowledge-paradigm' towards serving environmental management needs." Karatzas argued further that environmental informatics "is an integrator of science, methods and techniques and not just the result of using information and software technology methods and tools for serving environmental engineering needs."
Agent-based models have many applications in biology, primarily due to the characteristics of the modeling method. Agent-based modeling is a rule-based, computational modeling methodology that focuses on rules and interactions among the individual components or the agents of the system. The goal of this modeling method is to generate populations of the system components of interest and simulate their interactions in a virtual world. Agent-based models start with rules for behavior and seek to reconstruct, through computational instantiation of those behavioral rules, the observed patterns of behavior.
Daycent is a daily time series biogeochemical model used in agroecosystems to simulate fluxes of carbon and nitrogen between the atmosphere, vegetation, and soil. It is a daily version of the CENTURY biogeochemical model.
The Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning group (KEMLg) is a research group belonging to the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) – BarcelonaTech. It was founded by Prof. Ulises Cortés. The group has been active in the Artificial Intelligence field since 1986.
"Envirome" is a concept that relates the core of environmental conditions with the successful biological performance of living beings. This concept was created in genetic epidemiology, in which an envirome is defined as the total set of environmental factors, both present, and past, that affect the state, and in particular the disease state, of an organism. The study of the envirome and its effects is termed enviromics. The term was first coined in the field of psychiatric epidemiology by J.C. Anthony in 1995. More recently, use of the term has been extended to the cellular domain, where cell functional enviromics studies both the genome and envirome from a systems biology perspective. In plants, enviromics is directly related to complex ecophysiology, in which the wide environment of the plants, into an omics scale, can be dissected and understood as a mosaic of possible growing factors and the balance of diverse resources available. In ecology, this concept can be related to the Shelford's law of tolerance. The enviromics is conceived as a pillar of the Modern Plant Breeding, capable to connect the design and development of breeding goals concealing it with the agronomic targets for a climate-smart agriculture. It also has the ability to bridge the knowledge gaps between the different levels of systems biology and phenomics in the context of Gene–environment interaction.
The Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) is a set of computer programs for simulating agricultural crop growth. It has been used in over 100 countries by agronomists for evaluating farming methods. One application has been assessing the possible impacts on agriculture of climate change and testing adaptation methods.
eWater is a non-profit organisation established by Australian Federal and State Governments. The role of eWater is to support integrated water resources management in Australia through development and implementation of the national hydrological modelling strategy (NHMS).
BAITSSS is biophysical Evapotranspiration (ET) computer model that determines water use, primarily in agriculture landscape, using remote sensing-based information. It was developed and refined by Ramesh Dhungel and the water resources group at University of Idaho's Kimberly Research and Extension Center since 2010. It has been used in different areas in the United States including Southern Idaho, Northern California, northwest Kansas, and Texas.
