Predicting impacts of climate change or alternative management on both food production and environment safety in agroecosystems is drawing great attention in the scientific community. Most of the existing agroecosystem models emphasize either crop growth or soil processes. This paper reports the latest development of an agroecosystem model (Crop-DNDC) by integrating detailed crop growth algorithms with an existing soil biogeochemical model, DNDC (Li et al., J. Geophys. Res. (1992) 9759). In the Crop-DNDC model, crop growth is simulated not only by tracking crop physiological processes (phenology, leaf area index, photosynthesis, respiration, assimilate allocation, rooting processes and nitrogen uptake), but also by calculating water [...]