Introducing GeoAquaCrop: Regional Crop Modelling Made Accessible
- Post by: Seyed Hosseini
- October 19, 2026
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We are glad to announce the release of GeoAquaCrop, an open-source Python package developed in collaboration with researchers from Aalto University and the University of Manchester. GeoAquaCrop runs FAO’s AquaCrop crop model across entire regions, river basins, or countries on a spatial grid, removing the data preparation and infrastructure burden that has traditionally made regional crop modelling slow and complex.
The package takes a geospatial boundary as input and handles the full pipeline: it downloads and prepares climate, soil, crop calendar, and crop area data; runs the AquaCrop-OSPy model in parallel across every grid cell; and presents the results in an interactive dashboard. Outputs include crop yields, crop water use, and irrigation water requirements, and can be exported as NetCDF, GeoTIFF, or CSV files.
‘Give it a geospatial boundary file and it handles the whole pipeline. Point it at a historical period or a future climate scenario and the workflow is identical — only the forcing changes.’
GeoAquaCrop supports 15 crops under both rainfed and irrigated conditions, historical climate data from 1979, and future projections from SSP1-2.6 to SSP5-8.5. It is modular by design, so preprocessing, simulation, and visualisation can be installed and used independently or as a single toolchain. The package is released under the Apache-2.0 licence and is fully documented.
The tool was built in collaboration with Josias Láng-Ritter, Chris Bowden, Seyed Hossein Hosseini, Henrikki Tenkanen, and Tim Foster. A preprint with a Mekong River Basin case study is forthcoming. The code is available on GitHub, and the team welcomes contributions, issue reports, and feedback from the crop modelling and water resources community.
https://github.com/aquacropos/geoaquacrop