Abstract: Croplands play an important role in the carbon budget of many regions. However, the estimation of their carbon balance remains difficult due to diversity and complexity of the processes involved. We report the coupling of a one-dimensional soil water, heat, and CO2 flux model (SOILCO2), a pool concept of soil carbon turnover (RothC), and a crop growth module (SUCROS) to predict the net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of carbon. The coupled model, further referred to as AgroC, was extended with routines for managed grassland as well as for root exudation and root decay. In a first step, the coupled model was applied to two winter wheat sites and one upland grassland site in Germany. The model was calibrated based on soil water content, soil temperature, biometric, and soil respiration measurements for each site, and validated in terms of hourly NEE measured with the eddy covariance technique. The overall model performance of AgroC was sufficient with a model efficiency above 0.78 and a correlation coefficient above 0.91 for NEE. In a second step, AgroC was optimized with eddy covariance NEE measurements to examine the effect of different objective functions, constraints, and data-transformations on estimated NEE. It was found that NEE showed a distinct sensitivity to the choice of objective function and the inclusion of soil respiration data in the optimization process. In particular, both positive and negative day- and nighttime fluxes were found to be sensitive to the selected optimization strategy. Additional consideration of soil respiration measurements improved the simulation of small positive fluxes remarkably. Even though the model performance of the selected optimization strategies did not diverge substantially, the resulting cumulative NEE over simulation time period differed substantially. Therefore, it is concluded that data transformations, definitions of objective functions, and data sources have to be considered cautiously when a terrestrial ecosystem model is used to determine NEE by means of eddy covariance measurements. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract: For spatial crop and agro-systems modelling, there is often a discrepancy between the scale of measured driving data and the target resolution. Spatial data aggregation is often necessary, which can introduce additional uncertainty into the simulation results. Previous studies have shown that climate data aggregation has little effect on simulation of phenological stages, but effects on net primary production (NPP) might still be expected through changing the length of the growing season and the period of grain filling. This study investigates the impact of spatial climate data aggregation on NPP simulation results, applying eleven different models for the same study region (∼34,000 km2), situated in Western Germany. To isolate effects of climate, soil data and management were assumed to be constant over the entire study area and over the entire study period of 29 years. Two crops, winter wheat and silage maize, were tested as monocultures. Compared to the impact of climate data aggregation on yield, the effect on NPP is in a similar range, but is slightly lower, with only small impacts on averages over the entire simulation period and study region. Maximum differences between the five scales in the range of 1–100 km grid cells show changes of 0.4–7.8% and 0.0–4.8% for wheat and maize, respectively, whereas the simulated potential NPP averages of the models show a wide range (1.9–4.2 g C m−2 d−1 and 2.7–6.1 g C m−2 d−1for wheat and maize, respectively). The impact of the spatial aggregation was also tested for shorter time periods, to see if impacts over shorter periods attenuate over longer periods. The results show larger impacts for single years (up to 9.4% for wheat and up to 13.6% for maize). An analysis of extreme weather conditions shows an aggregation effect in vulnerability up to 12.8% and 15.5% between the different resolutions for wheat and maize, respectively. Simulations of NPP averages over larger areas (e.g. regional scale) and longer time periods (several years) are relatively insensitive to climate data.