Mourad Latati
Research Interests: development of operational methods for the assessment, exploration and design of diversified cropping systems, both at field and farm levels
Assessment of performance and resilience of cereal-legume intercropping system by using the new version of the STICS soil-crop model under contrasted climate conditions
Soil-crop models are widely used as tools to evaluate the combined effects of cropping practices, soil management and climate on the agro-environmental indicators and agroecosystem performance. They provide a wide range of predictive information that is useful to design and co-evaluate innovative cropping system intercropping cereals-legumes). However, intercropping modeling is still under development to better take into account the various interactions between crops. The present project targets the calibration and validation of a new version of the STICS soil-crop model recently improved to simulate consistently a wide range of bi-specific annual intercrops. The main objective will aim to test and evaluate this new version on two (i.e. chickpea-durum wheat and forage pea-barley intercropping) legume-based intercropping systems that are commonly practiced by Algerian farmers under contrasted pedoclimatic and cropping practices conditions. The new version of STIC will be tested according to the following steps (i) first evaluation (without parameterization) for sole cropped species by using existing data on both legumes and cereals in monoculture; (ii) parameterization within the collected data on monoculture system and then (iii) direct validation to evaluate the prediction on intercropping system without re-parameterization. The relevance and validity domain for simulating intercropping by the new version of STICS will be compared to results obtained using the previous standard version of STICS (V9.2).
Mourad Latati is an agronomist. His main expertise and interest are the development of operational methods for the assessment, exploration and design of diversified cropping systems, both at field and farm levels. The research activities aim to develop and promote agronomic applications resulting from researches on the assessment of both agroforestery and arable organic cropping system in terms of sustainability and resilience. He is especially interested in the agroecophysiological mechanisms implied in improvement of water and nutrients use in agroecosystem under dry farming systems.
Based on agroenvironmental modelling (i.e. Browse and STICS, MOMOS and CHN models) and participative approaches, Pr. Mourad is working on the design and co-assessment of innovative cropping systems in both arable and agroforestry systems to better improve the agronomic, environmental and socioeconomical performances of diversified cropping systems (i.e. intercropping, rotation, cover crop, agroforestry). Mourad Latati have also strong experience in the coordinating of international research project as a person investigator under the collaboration with a lot of partners from the Mediterranean basin (PRIMA section 1 (CAMA) and 2 (BIODIVERSIFY) and ARIMNET programs (SEMIARID).