Sustainable food-energy-water systems and emerging
technologies raise challenges for modelling agricultural systems. We must
move beyond modelling uniform fields of annual crops to address the issues at
the core of this Congress. Models must be designed to deal with complex
production systems: which vary spatially (e.g. widely-spaced agroforestry,
skip-row cropping); where management exacerbates heterogeneity (e.g. residue
management in oil palm plantations, nutrient transfers by livestock); or where
the boundaries of the spatial unit are fluid in time (e.g. land that is a
community resource).
Agricultural models and their software need to be
continually improved to accommodate these needs. We encourage submissions
that focus on new/improved methods/approaches (rather than examples of usage)
in order that the agricultural modellers can learn as a community.