Abstract
Phosphorus (P) is an essential nutrient necessary for maintaining crop growth, however, it’s often used inefficiently within agroecosystems, driving industry to find new ways to deliver P to crops sustainably. We aim to combine traditional soil and crop measurements with climate-driven mathematical models, to give insight into optimising the timing and placement of fertiliser applications. The whole plant crop model combines an above-ground leaf model with an existing spatially explicit below-ground root-soil model to estimate plant P uptake and above ground dry mass. We let P-dependent photosynthesis estimate carbon (C) mass, which in conjunction with temperature sets the root-growth-rate. The addition of the leaf model achieved a better estimate of two sets of barley field trial data for plant P uptake, compared with just the root-soil model alone. Furthermore, discrete fertiliser placement increases plant P uptake by up to 10 % in comparison to incorporating fertiliser. By capturing essential plant processes we are able to accurately simulate P and C use and water and P movement during a cropping season. The powerful combination of mechanistic modelling and experimental data allows physiological processes to be quantified accurately and useful agricultural predictions for site specific locations to be made.
Highlights
The world-wide production of food has increased due to the demands of an ever expanding global human population (Brown 2012)
In this paper we extend a root-soil model (Roose and Fowler 2004b; Heppell et al 2015) which estimates plant P uptake, with an above ground leaf model which estimates above ground dry mass, to produce a whole crop model
We compare two sets of barley field experimental data against the coupled model, the leaf model and the root model
Summary
The world-wide production of food has increased due to the demands of an ever expanding global human population (Brown 2012). Due to the lack of land available for agricultural expansion, there is a need to increase crop yields sustainably by manipulating the existing environment in which crops are grown and breeding more resource efficient crops. We are faced with the hard task of increasing P use efficiency (using less P and at the same time increasing crop yields), which could be achieved by altering plant traits to reduce P demands of crops and / or increase recovery of added P, developing mechanical or chemical techniques to promote availability of added P, and/or changing properties of the soil to enhance P capture by crop roots (Vance et al 2003; Lynch 2007; Withers et al 2014)
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