BODIUM4Farmers: A tool to assess the impact of management measures on soil functions

The BODIUM model (König et al., 2023) is a systemic soil model which aims to simulate the effect of changing agricultural management practices on soil functions such as yield, water storage and filtration, nutrient recycling, carbon storage and habitat for biodiversity. For this purpose, the influence of crop rotation, soil cultivation, fertilisation as well as the effect of a changing climate is taken into account site-specifically.

A version of this model, the BODIUM4Farmers, is intended to serve farmers as an on-site decision support tool for long-term planning of soil management measures in response to actual economic and ecological requirements. The model considers site- and farm-specific conditions and requires a number of input variables: a description of the soil profile, weather and management data.
In cooperation with farmers and agricultural advisors, we are currently developing an optimised interface that allows farmers to use the tool as efficiently as possible. Co-design workshops with users from agricultural practice have provided important impulses on technical realization such as database connectivity and graphical user interface design. Furthermore, we discussed potential future management options to be implemented for users in the tool and how to present results in an easy-to-understand manner.
With this contribution, we introduce BODIUM4Farmers, present the current state of development and encourage discussions and feedback from scientists experienced in science-to-practice transfer.

König, S., U. Weller, B. Betancur-Corredor, B. Lang, T. Reitz, M. Wiesmeier, U. Wollschläger, and H.-J. Vogel (2023): BODIUM – a systemic approach to model the dynamics of soil functions. Europ. J. Soil Sci., doi:10.1111/ejss.13411