Abstract: In order to accurately simulate the rice growth process, based on the photothermal reaction of rice development, field experiments on different sowing dates were designed using double cropping early rice ‘Wuyou 157’ and double cropping late rice ‘Select 10’ in the Agrometeorological Experimental Station at Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology in 2012–2013. Meanwhile, the growth stage observational data as well as meteorological data for double cropping early rice ‘G98-202’ from Nanchang station of Jiangxi Province and double cropping late rice ‘Gold 207’ from Nankang station of Jiangxi Province were collected during 2002–2008. Three models (photothermal effective model, rice clock model and effective accumulative temperature model) were calibrated to obtain the model parameters, and then independent data were used to test the models. The results showed that the decision coefficients (R²) based on the 1:1 line between simulated and observed days of the photothermal effectiveness model for simulating rice were 0.994, 0.994, 0.988 and 0.989 at stages of sowing to jointing, jointing to heading, heading to filling, and filling to maturity, respectively, and the RMSE was less than four days. For the entire growth period, the simulation accuracy of photothermal effective model for ‘Wuyou 157’, ‘G98-202’, ‘Select 10’, ‘Gold 207’ increased by 2.42%, 4.55%, 8.74% and 4.55%, respectively, compared with the effective accumulative temperature model. Our results suggested that, in the simulation of Jiangxi early rice and late rice growth period, the precision of the photothermal effective model was slightly higher than that of the rice clock model, and the accuracy of effective accumulated temperature model performed the worst. The results can provide a reference for the selection of rice growth period prediction methods in Jiangxi Province.

Key words: Tamarix chinensis, IsoSource model, water use strategy, coastal zone, oxygen stable isotope