This application models the effect of CO2 on plant growth. It was originally developed to understand the impacts of naturally-occurring CO₂ seepages at Latera in Italy in support of research into the potential impacts of geological CO2 storage.
Latera is a site in a volcanic area of Italy where relatively high levels of carbon dioxide produced at depth reach the surface in some locations. With support from the Department of the Environment and Climate Change, Quintessa has worked with colleagues from the British Geological Survey and the University of Rome to model the important processes taking place at this site using software based on Quintessa’s QPAC code. Understanding sites like Latera where there are naturally-occurring fluxes of carbon dioxide to the surface can help to identify knowledge gaps and requirements for further studies and experiments relevant to geological carbon storage.
The application has a soil/plant subsystem model that includes an innovative representation of the effects of CO2 on plants. The model can be applied to pasture or arable crops and can be considered to have three components: plant growth; carbon cycling in the plant-soil system; and effects of changing CO2 inputs on both plant growth and carbon cycling.
The Latera QPAC Player application is a good example of the use of QPAC-based codes to model complex systems in a flexible way, and in particular the automatic generation of Graphical User Interface applications using QPAC Player technology to enable users to explore the key features of the system being studied.