Description of the working packages (WP)

The main mechanisms governing the transfer of trace elements from soil to plant organs were first conceptualized and then modelled mathematically : geochemistry of contaminants in soil (WP1), uptake by the root system (WP2) and partitioning between plant organs along with plant growth (WP3).

Thanks to the power of computer-assisted intensive calculation, it was possible to perform a huge number of simulations in order to rank input variables, to test hypotheses, to understand the relative importance of the mechanisms and finally to possibly simplify the models. Afterwards, the models of availability, uptake and partitioning were coupled to the Stics crop model (http://www6.paca.inra.fr/stics) in order to consider the effect of climate and of the agricultural practices on the accumulation of trace elements by crops (WP4). The whole is the SimTraces model that can be used to manage crops for optimizing crop quality or phytoextraction efficiency.