MINIATURA 8: digital twin for sustainable agriculture

The aim of Dr. Arkadiusz Głogowski's project from the Department of Environmental Shaping and Protection at UPWr is to create a tool for integrated hydrological and agricultural nitrogen cycle modeling – a digital twin that combines a plant growth and nitrogen cycle model with advanced hydrological models of water flow and pollutant transport.

– Freshwater systems are constantly exposed to various stressors: climate change, anthropogenic ecosystem modifications, and intensive fertilization. Agriculture contributes to the pollution of freshwater, especially with nitrogen – says the UPWr scientist. He adds that nitrogen, being the most commonly used fertilizer, is highly mobile and susceptible to leaching, leading to its accumulation in aquatic ecosystems and posing a threat to biodiversity.

– My research involves three key stages. First: creating a model in the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) software for crop management. Compared to previous research conducted at UPWr under the WATERAGRI project from the Horizon 2020 program, where we mainly focused on the quantity and direction of water flow in the agricultural catchment, these analyses need to be extended to phenological analyses of crops, macronutrient compositions in different development phases, water quality, and soil chemical composition analysis. All these will constitute the second stage of the research task. With a model based on field data, we can proceed to the final phase of the research task – integrating the DSSAT model with the HydroGeoSphere (HGS) hydrogeological model. I hope that creating the HGS-DSSAT model, thus combining two existing scientific models for plant development (DSSAT) and water flow (HGS), will not only allow better estimation of agricultural nitrogen quantities in the environment but also help farmers better plan crop fertilization – explains Dr. Arkadiusz Głogowski.

The implementation of Dr. Głogowski's project is conducted in collaboration with a farm in Lubnowo and aims to better understand nitrogen migration in the environment, which has the potential to reduce the negative impact of agriculture on aquatic ecosystems. This will enable the optimization of fertilizer doses, providing economic benefits through reduced expenses and environmental benefits through biodiversity protection. Optimal fertilizer resource management also increases agriculture's resilience to fertilizer price fluctuations in the market.

The scientist's research is of international importance, filling a research gap regarding nitrogen mobility in the environment.

International collaboration

The project includes two internships: at the University of Florida in the USA and with the company Aquanty in Waterloo, Canada. Collaboration with the creators of the DSSAT and HGS software will allow the development of the advanced HGS-DSSAT module, enabling better modeling of nitrogen transport in the environment. Additionally, Dr. Głogowski is also employed as a post-doc at the University of Basel under the OPUS-LAP program conducted in collaboration with UPWr and the FARMISE project under the HORIZON EUROPE program.
 

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