System for Environmental and Agricultural Modelling; Linking European Science and Society

SEAMLESS integrated project aims at developing an integrated framework that allows ex-ante assessment of agricultural and environmental policies and technological innovations. The framework will have multi-scale capabilities ranging from field and farm to the EU25 and globe; it will be generic, modular and open and using state-of-the art software. The project is carried out by a consortium of 30 partners, led by Wageningen University (NL). contract no. 010036-2). Its content does not represent the official position of the European Commission and is entirely under the responsibility of the authors. " "The information in this document is provided as is and no guarantee or warranty is given that the information is fit for any particular purpose. The user thereof uses the information at its sole risk and liability." Disclaimer 2: Within the SEAMLESS project many reports are published. Some of these reports are intended for public use, others are confidential and intended for use within the SEAMLESS consortium only. As a consequence references in the public reports may refer to internal project deliverables that cannot be made public outside the consortium. Objective within the project Make available a flexible software simulation system to estimate agricultural production and system externalities in response to technical management, in specific weather-soil conditions. Task(s) and Activity code(s): T3.2-A3.2.9 Input from (Task and Activity codes): Several simulation tools allow studying the impact of agricultural management on production activities in specific environments. Such tools are specialized, to different extents, to specific production activities: arable crops/cropping systems, grassland, orchards, agroforestry, livestock etc. Also, their focus includes to various degrees the estimate of system externalities which may have a negative environmental impact. Furthermore, the structure of such tools does neither allow an easy plug-in of modules for different agricultural production activities, nor the use of different approaches for the simulation of processes via alternate components. Finally, such systems are proprietary systems of either research groups or projects. The SEAMLESS project aims at providing a tool to integrate analyses of impacts on a wide range of aspects of sustainability and multi-functionality of agriculture. This requires evaluating agricultural production and system externalities for most, if not all, types of agricultural production systems. It also requires the availability of a simulation framework which can be extended and updated by research teams with possibly different expertise, which allows a manageable transfer of research results to operational tools, and which is transparent with respect to …