Review of application of EPIC crop growth model

Climate change is breaking global food supplies. The Environmental Policy Impact Climate (EPIC) model is capable of simulating crop productivity for hundreds of years under a variety of climate scenarios, environmental conditions, and management systems and is often used to study the impact of climate change on agriculture. Combined with systematic evaluation and meta-analysis, this paper reviews the application of EPIC crop growth model. Those research can be divided into three categories: the improvement of crop growth model accuracy, the applied research on the effects of climate change, and the mitigation of agricultural drought risk. In addition, the paper puts forward four aspects of research hot spots in the future: applications of extreme climate change, application of agricultural drought risk assessment and early warning, application of an agricultural catastrophe management system, application of drought relief operations. Research shows the accuracy of the model is greatly improved by determining the genetic parameters of crops, modifying the parameters according to the weather, land use and technical conditions, and establishing the local and even global model parameter database; the uncertainty of model parameters, input data and model structure is analyzed to improve the stability of the model. In the process of discussing the influence mechanism and sensitivity analysis of climate change on crop growth, the analysis of various meteorological factors is concentrated from multi-factor analysis to temperature and precipitation. With the development of computing technology, the emergence of GIS technology and GCMs technology makes it possible to predict the impact of different meteorological factors on crop growth under future climate change. In some studies, EPIC crop growth model has been performed to reduce the risk of agricultural drought.