The CCAFS Regional Agricultural Forecasting Toolbox (CRAFT) is a software platform designed for yield forecasting at 5 or 30 arc-minutes spatial resolutions using an ensemble modeling approach. Twenty-three important food and feed crops have been implemented using the DSSAT Cropping System Model as the main crop model engine.
CRAFT is an initiative of CCAFS and was developed in partnership with the University of Florida. It has been successfully applied to forecast the in-season yield of wheat and rice cropping systems in Nepal and Bangladesh. It has also been evaluated for yield forecasting and climate change applications in West Africa in collaboration with the WASCAL Project, Agrhymet, and the CASCAID Project of ICRISAT. Recently, it was utilized for high-resolution seasonal crop yield forecasting in diverse maize environments in Ethiopia (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cliser.2023.100425) and for assessing the impact of climate change on wheat production in Kazakhstan (https://doi.org/10.3390/su16010293).
For a more detailed description of CRAFT, see the publication entitled “A multi-scale and multi-model gridded framework for forecasting crop production, risk analysis, and climate change impact studies,” published in Environmental Modeling and Software (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2019.02.006).
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