The STICS soil-crop model: a generic model to simulate the functioning of agroecosystems

This chapter offers a general presentation of the STICS soil-crop model. Through numerous illustrations dealing notably with genetic x environment x management interactions, it presents an overview of the wide domain of validity of the model, along with its performances, demonstrating its potential for a wide range of agronomic and environmental applications. Since the beginning of its story in the early 90’s, STICS has been able to remain a generic and robust model that allows to simulate the functioning of agro-ecosystems, both in temperate and tropical environments. As highlighted in this chapter, and particularly in the last two sections, many efforts were, and are still, put to keep the model up-to-date and in a permanent state of evolution towards better representation of cropping systems, allowing to analyze novel research and applied questions.