Piloting potential yield for Rice and Maize using PyAEZ in India
On 18 January 2022, FAO Geospatial unit in support to GreenAg project (GCP/IND/183/GEF), in collaboration with the GreenAg team in India, organized a knowledge sharing and experience event, focusing on climate, soil and land cover data to simulate potential yield for Maize and Rice using PyAEZ. During this virtual consultation, a technical discussion focused on an overview of the PyAEZ model, input data requirement, and spatial and temporal resolution of the datasets. With a particular interest in simulating the potential yield of various crops, the consultation focussed on piloting for Maize and Rice.
PyAEZ is a Python package equipped with computational routines related to the Agro-ecological Zoning (AEZ) framework. The package encapsulates the complex calculations in AEZ and tries to provide a user-friendly and intuitive way to input data and generate national AEZ information. PyAEZ provides a transparent set of procedures for land resources appraisal adhering to the established FAO Land Evaluation Framework. The PyAEZ python package was developed as a collaborative effort of the Geo-informatics Centre (GIC) of Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) Thailand in collaboration with the regional initiative “Capacity building for Agro-Ecological Zone (AEZ) mapping and modelling to project climate suitability of crops and land uses” under the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (FAO-RAP) and the Strengthening Agro-climatic Monitoring and Information System (SAMIS) project in Lao PDR.
As technical support to the GreenAg team in India, FAO has been using and promoting PyAEZ as a crop model and a framework of standard procedural steps to simulate crop yield that can be scalable and simulated for any region of the world using global datasets.