ArchiCrop: Crop model dynamics downscaled to 3D+t plant architecture

Evolving agricultural practices and contexts invite to reconsider the way crop and plant models represent agroecosystem processes. Crop models assume spatial homogeneity, which reduces confidence in their predictions for structurally heterogeneous systems, whereas FSPMs’ complexity limits their application to field-scale or large-scale studies. To benefit from strengths of both approaches, we introduce ArchiCrop, a parametric 3D architectural model of cereals that generates plant geometries constrained by crop model dynamics and coordination rules. Inspired by the concept of equifinality, ArchiCrop generates a morphospace of architecturally diverse morphotypes which remain functionally equivalent at crop scale in terms of LAI and height. This multiscale approach enables a model-to-model comparison of processes computed at different scales on wheat, rice, maize and sorghum. We demonstrate its application evaluating light interception Beer’s formalism in STICS soil-crop model relying on the leaf-resolved radiosity model Caribu for the 3D comparison reference simulations, for a sorghum monocrop. We show that the consideration of the variability of only two plant architectural traits, leaf insertion angle and leaf number, introduces up to 27 % variability in the cumulated absorbed light at the end of the season. This result is strictly applicable to single-stem cereals such as densely sown sorghum or maize. A possible outcome from this method is also the definition of metamodels for crop model processes, as exemplified for extinction coefficient of Beer’s law. ArchiCrop can support a range of applications, including crop model uncertainty analysis, model-assisted phenotyping, and ideotype design.