AgMIP and Partners: Advancing the Science of Modeling.

The inception of the Agriculture Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) focused on developing an international community of scientists interested in agricultural models. This community was motivated by the common interest in bringing experimentalist and simulation modelers together to provide a robust evaluation of crop and livestock models and to understand what was needed to improve the models for use as predictive tools about the potential impact of climate scenarios. Over the past five years, there have been great strides in the model intercomparison for a number of crops, e.g., maize, wheat, rice, sugarcane, groundnut, and millet with ongoing efforts in soybean and canola. These efforts have broadened to include evaluation of the soil processes, evapotranspiration and pests and diseases. The overall AgMIP effort has spawned new concepts in data storage and retrieval to provide an easier method of capturing data from a variety of sources and methods for making the data available to a variety of models. Through the commitment of a large number of scientists to the AgMIP goal, there has been outstanding progress in advancing both experimental techniques and simulation models over the past five years.