Yield-SAFE v2 - Biophysical model for tree and crop yields in agroforestry

Agroforestry systems integrate trees with livestock and/or arable crops on the same parcel of land. Compared to monoculture arable or grass systems, agroforestry systems can enhance soil conservation, carbon sequestration, species and habitat diversity, and provide additional sources of farm income. However, as the trees increase in size, the grass and/or arable yields will tend to decline due to light and water competition with the trees. The form of the tree-crop yield relationship will vary with the level of solar radiation, rainfall, the species being grown, management actions such as choice of planting date and pruning, the soil type, and the time from tree planting. The Yield-SAFE v2 provides the opportunity to model the response of tree-only, agroforestry, and crop-only systems in the same worksheet. Yield-SAFE is a spreadsheet-based biophysical model which has been developed in Microsoft® Excel® to enable the prediction of the relationship between tree and crop yields over the rotation of the tree component. The full name for Yield-SAFE is the €œYIeld trategyEstimator for Long term Design of Silvoarable AgroForestry in Europe€ . The original Yield-SAFE model was developed with funding from the European Union through the Silvoarable Agroforestry For Europe project (contract number QLK5-CT-2001-00560). The process of creating a default publicly available version of the model has been enabled through the BioForce project funded by the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.