Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S.
Because of APEX’s solid background and capabilities, it is used to support modeling needs in projects funded by the U.S. Both models have been used under numerous conditions to assess agricultural systems across a broad range of landscapes at different spatial scales, design sustainable land management interventions, environmental impact studies, etc. The models account for major physical and biological processes of agricultural systems, including hydrology, crop growth, and yield, water balance, nutrients transformations, storage, and transport (nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon), soil loss fate and transport, etc. APEX and EPIC are designed to estimate how climate and management practices influence soil-plant-water-nutrients relations. APEX is a multi-field landscape model that essentially simulates multiple spatially explicit distributed fields with EPIC with interactions among the fields. EPIC is a field-scale model designed to simulate homogeneous areas in terms of weather, soil, topography, plant cover and management. The Environmental Policy Integrated Climate Model (EPIC) and the Agricultural Policy Environmental eXtender-APEX are versatile and useful tools for evaluating complex landscape and management scenarios. Models that represent agricultural systems have become indispensable tools for designing management practices, evaluating sustainable production, and minimizing environmental stresses. However, the complexity of the system often leads to a greater complexity in the model structure, with a large input of data required to simulate such systems. These models are often designed to capture the most important features of a given agricultural system that adequately represent a complex system. Simulation models have long been used in agriculture with varying levels of success. This tool is suitable for all kinds of applications and has been successfully used for the creation of APEX model runs in numerous studies. The simple architecture of the tool helps users maintain the quality of the data and allows error-free editing of APEX model inputs to characterize the system under study.
#EPIC CENTER APEX SERIES#
A series of scripts were developed as a back-end engine that automates data formatting and editing of linked APEX input ASCII files including database libraries. Ultimately, the APEXeditor substitutes existing GUI programs such as WinAPEX or ArcAPEX that require installation or additional licensing. The user can load APEX input files into the spreadsheet tool and the GUI offers meta information and provides functions to edit, write, and run the APEX model. The APEXeditor requires minimal additional learning to operate the tool for those who already have basic level of knowledge in Excel. Microsoft Excel is a popular spreadsheet program that has the largest user base among scientists and researchers, thus providing a relatively common platform in which stages the tool. APEX, in its native form, requires users to edit text files for modifying input files therefore a GUI interface can aid users in modification of these files and reduce errors. The APEXeditor, an Excel-based tool has been developed using the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to provide a graphical user interface (GUI) to the Agricultural Policy Environmental eXtender (APEX) model.
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