I. Hernandez-Ochoa: New Field Arrangements for Sustainable Agriculture: Improving and Extending Crop Models to Explore Agro-ecosystem Dynamics

Ixchel M. Hernandez Ochoa is a postdoc in the PhenoRob project at the Crop Science Group, University of Bonn. She received her bachelor’s degree in Agronomy from the Zamorano University in Honduras and her master’s degree in Horticultural Sciences and Ph.D. degree in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Florida, USA. She has worked with crop simulation models to explore climate change impacts and adaptation strategies for cereal production.

She joined the Core Project 5 on April, 2020 and she is currently working on the application and further development of agroecosystem models to explore how the implementation of different spatial crop arrangements can contribute to a more sustainable agriculture by improving resource use efficiency, crop health and yield, and agroecosystem services.

The new agricultural revolution is set to take place with the implementation of new agricultural technologies such as robotics, remote sensing, machine learning, system modeling, among others. The objective is to use agro-ecosystem models to explore how new field arrangements (patchy crops) can contribute to a more sustainable agriculture. For this project we are going to use the SIMPLACE platform to do an experiment set up for the PATCHCrop field experiment, which includes a variety of summer and winter crops arranged in patches considering soil characteristics, we are going to use the observed data, remote sensing and machine learning tools to improve, calibrate and validate our agro-ecosystem models.

We expect to develop and adapt agro-ecosystem modeling tools for diversified cropping systems (in terms of crops and field arrangements) at field and landscape scale, to gain knowledge on how these practices play a role on multifunctional agroecosystem performance, from crop growth dynamics (in terms of health, growth, and yields) to resource use efficiency of inputs and biodiversity.