Crops, planting and farmland

Agricultural territories are structured in relation with the different goal s assigned to agriculture. These goals are related to (i) economy of farms and integrated chains of production, (ii) environmental impacts, (iii) natu ral resource preservation, (iv) quality of products, (v) landscape manageme nt and rural development. Each of these objectives need to be analysed with in different functional spatial entities each of them imposing specific eva luation criteria for crops at field scale level. Thus it is necessary to de velop a multi-criteria analysis of crop functioning taking into account a w ider range of environmental constraints. In such a new context, the evaluat ion of new cultivars offered to farmers should be based also on a large mul ti-functional analysis. Models based on an explicit individual plant functi oning within plant populations become necessary for interpreting the "genot ype by environment by crop management" interactions in a functional way lea ding to the identification of regulations of genes expressions.