The seasonal characterization engine, an application for describing environment from the perspective of crop development

Agricultural research relies on accurate characterization of the growing environment in field trials. Thus, it is critical to describe the crop growing conditions at a particular trial location. We developed the seasonal characterization engine (SCE), an R shiny app which allows researchers to generate seasonal profiles for a given set of trials. The SCE interfaces with APSIM to dynamically model crop development under the specified trial conditions and returns seasonal information to the user. Seasonal profiles are useful for environmental description and analysis in multi-environment crop varietal trials. Seasonal covariates, derived from these profiles, are useful, biologically relevant parameters for capturing environmental effects in models of crop adaptation. We anticipate that this application will be used by researchers and agronomists to facilitate the description of seasonal conditions and the collection of phenologically derived environmental information which may be used in subsequent modeling.