Modeling Plant Growth, Nutrition, and Dynamics of Soil Organic Carbon Under Changing Climate and Land Use

SOC and nutrients are important natural resources that play a vital role in soil fertility management and ecosystem stabilization. Improvement in SOC and soil nutrients with optimum availability to plants further enhances the growth and productivity of different crops and cropping systems under changing climate and land use systems as a mitigating option. Cropping systems and other SOC models have evolved over the last four decades in response to the demand for modeling of SOC and soil nutrient dynamics for their quantification in different crops and cropping systems under varied management practices. Crop growth simulation or cropping system models are computer-based software programs designed to mimic crop growth, nutrients, and organic carbon dynamic process in the soil to compute the relationship among soil nutrients, organic carbon, plant growth, and soil water content in the soil-plant-atmosphere system under spatial and temporal variability. Cropping system models, DSSAT (Decision Support System for Agro Technology Transfer) and APSIM (Agricultural Production System Simulator) are the important process-based models used for the quantification of long-term change in SOC, plant nutrients, and their effect on the growth and development of crop plants across the world. Therefore, the present chapter attempts to briefly elaborate upon the impact of climate change on plant nutrient dynamics, SOC, and application, and evaluation of different models available for SOC and soil nutrient dynamics under different crops and cropping systems with future prospectus of carbon and nutrients model.