Development and assessment of olive orchard growth model.

In the last decades, several crop simulation models have been developed and applied worldwide. The majority of these models was focussed on simulating growth cycle and related yields of most traditional annual crops (wheat, maize, etc.). By contrast, only few models were developed to simulate perennial crops such as olive orchard. The scarcity of these models was probably due to the complexity at reproducing dynamics between ground and tree vegetation. In this work, a simplified process-based approach was used to estimate soil water dynamics and daily biomass accumulation considering the competition for soil water availability on both ground and tree biomass production. Preliminary results confirmed the reliability/possibility of this simple approach at reproducing daily water and carbon dynamics within olive orchards.