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Green Acres with Greenhat

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Since we touched on agricultural simulation last week in our discussion of remote sensing, I thought it might be fun to kick up some dirt and see what we can uncover about current practices in computer-based farm studies. So, we'll detour a bit this week and look at the modeling programs available from Greenhat Software in Armidale, Australia. Greenhat has developed an entire suite of software for use in modeling soil, plants, environmental features, and the interactions among all of these components.

PlantMod is Greenhat's interactive plant modeling product. It allows the user to adjust the environment a simulated plant "feels" by changing the physical conditions of its surroundings, such as atmospheric pressure (of carbon dioxide, in this case). The five areas of plant physiology encompassed by PlantMod are light attenuation, photosynthesis, transpiration, temperature and growth functions. Based on complex mathematical models, PlantMod nonetheless is accessible to people of varied backgrounds and levels of expertise. Full explanation of the models is included for the research scientist, while teachers and students can employ the tool without a complete understanding of the underlying minutiae.

WaterMod is Greenhat's powerful soil hydrology modeling counterpart to PlantMod. WaterMod allows for the simulation of the dynamics of water movement through a soil bed, allowing the scientist to set the physical characteristics of the simulated soil as he sees fit. WaterMod also lets the scientist account for rainfall and irrigation, drainage, evaporation, runoff and transpiration. In this way, a researcher can use WaterMod to make predictions about water movement in many different types of real farmland situations that he may encounter in his work. Like PlantMod, WaterMod appears to be well-suited to both heavy-duty research and explorative educational applications.

To learn more about Greenhat's suite of cropland simulation software, visit them on the Internet at: http://www.greenhat.com/watermod.htm

The copyright of the article Green Acres with Greenhat in Scientific Computing is owned by Adam Hughes. Permission to republish Green Acres with Greenhat in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.