Print PageAs the United States Congress has mandated additional biofuel production to reduce foreign oil imports and to improve the environmental footprint of the transportation sector, and as petroleum prices have increased, demand for bioenergy has continued to increase. As a result, it is important to be able to predict the crop yields that are expected from future bioenergy production, as well as the various environmental impacts that will accompany this production.
Therefore, models that can be used to make such predictions must be validated against as many of these agricultural outputs as possible. The Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model is a widely used and tested model for simulating many agricultural ecosystem processes including plant growth, crop yield, carbon and nutrient cycling, wind and water erosion, runoff, leaching, as well as changes in soil physical and chemical properties. Here we evaluate the performance of EPIC in its ability to simulate nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes and related variables against selected treatments of the Kellogg Biological Station's (KBS) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) cropping systems study. We will provide a brief description of the EPIC model in the context of bioenergy production, describe the pertinant submodels, and compare simulated and observed values of crop yields, N2O emissions, soil carbon dynamics, and soil moisture.
Results/Conclusions
The EPIC model does a reasonable job of simulating yields and environmental impacts of crop production, though it performs better at predicting some values than others. For example, it does better at predicting overall average yields than it does at specific yearly values, and it is better at predicting intra-annual N2O fluxes than yearly variability.
