Global Estimation of Crop Productivity Based on the GIS and EPIC Integration

Agriculture management and planning requires spatially accurate information on land production, at global or regional level. A wide variety of approaches have been developed to estimate land productivity at global level. We can mainly classify these approaches into two categories. One is used to assess land productivity potentials, such as FAO method (FAO 1978-80), which determines the ecological potential of land resources for crop production and to estimates land suitability with soil moisture conditions and other climate characteristics. In order to calculate biomass production and yield accurately, some applications are combined this potential yield in a semi-quantitative manner with several reduction factors directly or indirectly related to climate and/or soil and terrain conditions. Another is regression analysis method, which explicitly links climatic conditions to land and water resources and to production, trade, and consumption throughout the world. (Kjaiswal and Saha, 1993; Moen et. al., 1994; Franke et al. ,1990). Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC) is another very popularly used model to simulate crop yields at field level. It was developed by the USDA to analyze the relationship between soil erosion and agricultural productivity. The model integrates the major processed that occur in the soil-crop-atmosphere-management system, including: hydrology, weather, erosion, nutrients, plant growth, soil temperature, tillage, plant environmental control and economics (Williams et al, 1990; Williams, 1995). There are many test research about EPIC model, performed using different data and parameters (Roloff et al, 1998; Bryant et al, 1992; Edwards et al, 1994). It seems that EPIC was well suited for relative comparisons of soils, crops and management scenarios and has a good accurate to estimate field yields (Bouzaher et al, 1993). Geographic Information System (GIS) have emerged as powerful tools in the management and analysis of large amount of basic data and information. It is being applied increasingly to a variety of situations, including the simulation of crop productivity and the evaluation of land resources (FAO/IIASA, 1991). In this research, a new global food production estimation methodology is proposed. This methodology integrates Geographic Information System (GIS) with Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC) model. It applies a loose coupling approach that involves a commercial GIS package and EPIC program. Data are exchanged using either ASCII or binary data format between two software packages without a common user interface. With the integration of GIS technique, EPIC can be extended to the application of global or regional level. The prerequisite of this application has detailed descriptions of management practices in different locations. So for each crop type and grid cell, Inference Engine was developed to determine possible crop combinations, the optimum starting and ending dates of growth cycle. This program can ensure best possible crop yields for both rain-fed and irrigated condition. A case of main crop yield simulation is tested with GIS-based EPIC model in China, India and global level. In order to improve simulating accuracy, actual site information is necessary. A new straightforward approach to interpolating weekly mean climate data at unsampled points in space from weather-station observation is introduced. The methods improve upon commonly used procedures in that they incorporate spatially high-resolution digital elevation information, average environmental lapse rate, another higher-resolution longer-term monthly average temperature fields, daily average air temperatures at weather-station.