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Review of the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) Model

Desta Abayechaw

Traditional agronomic experiments were conducted at a specific location in time and space, resulting in long, seasonal, timeconsuming, and expensive experiments. An international team of scientists has developed a decision support system for the transfer of agrotechnology, which has been used by researchers from around and the world for 15 years. This package incorporates models for over 42 crops as well as tools to facilitate effective use of the models. Tools include database management programs for soil, weather, crop management, and experimental data, utilities, and implementation programs. Crop simulation models simulate growth, development, and yield in accordance with soil-plant-atmosphere dynamics. Over the last few years, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain the DSSAT crop models, partly due to the fact that there were different sets of computer code for different crops with little attention to software design at the level of crop models themselves. Thus, the DSSAT crop models have been re-designed and programmed to facilitate more efficient incorporation of new scientific advances, applications, documentation, and maintenance. The basis for the new DSSAT cropping system model (CSM) design is a modular structure in which components separate along scientific discipline lines and are structured to allow easy replacement or addition of modules. In this review paper, I described the approaches used to model the primary scientific components (soil, crop, weather, and management). Besides, the review paper describes the limitations, the future of the DSSAT model, and its importance. The benefits of the new, re-designed DSSAT–CSM will provide considerable opportunities for its development and others in the scientific community for greater cooperation in interdisciplinary research and in the application of knowledge to solve problems in the field, farm, and higher levels.