Hydrotools

Hydrotools is a Decision Support System (DSS) developed in C# Microsoft .Net Frameworks 4.0 with the aim to support the management of greenhouse soilless cultures, such as the calculation of nutrient solution, the assessment of water use and nutrient leaching in different fertilization management scenarios.

Hydrotools was developed by the Department of Crop Biology (now, Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment) of the University of Pisa and the Institute of Biometeorology (IBIMET) of National Research Council (Firenze, Italy)

The system architecture is based on a central database (SQLite database engine), which stores both input and output data, and two separate calculation tools:

SOLNUTRI, which calculates the salt concentrations of stock solutions used to prepare the nutrient solutions fed to the crop with a pre-set ion concentration;

SIMULHYDRO, which simulates crop plant nutrient uptake and the variations of the ionic composition of the nutrient solution in open, closed and semi-closed soilless systems.