Cropbox.jl: A Declarative Crop Modeling Framework

Cropbox.jl provides a domain specific language for developing crop models.

Crop models describe how agricultural crops grow under dynamic environmental conditions and management practices. The models have many applications in agricultural science including, but not limited to, predicting yields of the crops under climate change scenarios and finding an optimal strategy for maximizing the yield. Crop modeling can encompass multiple aspects of research activities, but practically speaking, it is a task of formulating quantitative knowledge about the crops and translating them into a computer program.

Many crop models were traditionally developed in imperative programming languages where unrestricted control flows and state mutations could easily lead to error-prone code and inevitable technical debts. Also model developers and model users were often left behind in two disconnected workflows due to the lack of interactive programming environment.

Cropbox is a new modeling framework to bring a declarative approach towards the crop modeling and to consolidate the model development and use in a streamlined workflow implemented on Julia ecosystem. With an insight that the crop model is essentially an integrated network of generalized state variables, the modelers can write down a high-level specification of the model system represented by a collection of variables with specific behaviors associated. The framework then analyzes the specification and automatically generates lower-level Julia code that works with regular functions implementing common features like simulation running, configuration management, evaluation with common metrics, calibration of parameters, visualization of the result, and manipulation of interactive plots.

In this talk, I will briefly introduce the design and implementation of Cropbox and demonstrate some modeling applications such as a coupled leaf gas-exchange model (LeafGasExchange.jl), a whole-plant garlic growth model (Garlic.jl), and a 3D root structure growth model (CropRootBox.jl).