APSIM Advanced Training 2025

This hands-on workshop introduces APSIM Next Generation while also equipping participants with essential skills for writing and debugging manager scripts.

The first part of the session will guide participants through the transition from APSIM Classic (v7.10) to APSIM Next Generation, covering key differences, migration steps, and hands-on simulations. Participants will gain practical experience running simulations and converting existing APSIM files to the new platform.

The second part of the workshop will focus on developing and troubleshooting manager logic in APSIM Next Generation. While not a coding course, this session will explore:

• Points of interface within the APSIM system
• Capturing and extending events to improve simulation control

By the end of the workshop, participants will have a solid foundation in APSIM Next Generation, be able to migrate legacy simulations, and effectively write and debug manager scripts to enhance their modelling capabilities.

Suitable for both new users as well as those already familiar with APSIM, we will take you through how to setup and run a crop model. The new interface will be mostly familiar to existing APSIM users, but there are significant changes to learn about, particularly in outputting and managing your results. Learn how to manage and analyse key events in the crop growth cycle.  You will also be introduced to the process of ongoing improvement to APSIM Next Generation, and how you will be able to contribute.

In APSIM the soil provides a central focus. Correctly reflecting the soil processes is hence key to a successful simulation. This workshop presents a brief description of the different modules used to simulating soil processes in APSIM Next Generation (SoilWater, Swim3, Nutrient and SoilTemperature) as well as their parameterisation. Commonly used parameterisation protocols will be presented along with tools, tips and tricks relating to levels of available information, including accessing soil resources. We will also discuss how to assess the sensibility of the simulation output and outline how you can contribute test datasets. The workshop assumes participants will know the basics of setting up a soil with SoilWat/SoilWater in APSIM v7.10 or Next Generation (e.g., introductory training modules).

This workshop presents the use of the APSIM Rotation Manager to simulate crop rotations and crop sequences. Simulating the impacts of intertemporal carry-over of soil water and soil nutrient resources as part of medium- and long-term crop selection and crop management decisions is a core research interest. The APSIM Rotation Manager allows users to flexibly define crop sequences of their interest and combine them with a range of threshold-based transition rules. In that way, APSIM allows to analyse the outcome of contrasting cropping strategies on production and environmental outcome indicators. This workshop covers a range of simple and more complex crop rotation managers and showcases how to use them for comparing alternative cropping strategies.

This workshop introduces the Crop Livestock Enterprise Model (CLEM) module in APSIM Next Gen. We will discuss the challenges and approach taken to model the whole-farm across a range of farming systems from family-owned subsistence farms to extensive beef systems, by tracking a range of farm resources through time as they are used or created from various farm activities and show how shortfalls in these resources influence the system.  As CLEM relies on other model output for aspects such as crop and pasture production, we will look at this linkage and plans to integrate directly with APSIM crop models. We will also discuss the individual-based ruminant model and herd management provided. This workshop also provides the opportunity to discuss the various visualisation and support components that have been added to CLEM to assist the user-base such as parameter validation, model descriptive summaries and visual display of model setup.

This session will introduce concepts of sensitivity analysis using the technique of Morris. The method will be explained, as will some examples of use already available within the literature. Finally, users will be introduced to the Morris and Sobol Sensitivity tools available within APSIM Next Gen and will undertake their own simple "hands on" example.  Attendees will need to be familiar with APSIM Next Generation and are encouraged to have the latest version installed prior to the workshop.

A day in the life of the APSIM Software Team and how you can contribute.

APSIM has a well-defined system for managing code and model maintenance. The software team uses this to ensure the quality of all changes to the model. It is the same system used by all our collaborators to contribute their science back into the APSIM community. This session will take users "under the hood" and show a real example of what happens when someone users contribute.

Many modern uses of APSIM include large simulations sets, cloud compute, workflows, etc. APSIM has been designed to help users harness the inherent capabilities within APSIM rather than writing scripts to generate large numbers of input files, or to run subsets of large input files. In this session you will learn how to manipulate your input files using APSIM itself to save you time.