CAREER: Quantifying Multi-Scale Climate-Smart-Agriculture Management for Triple Wins of Food Production, Climate Mitigation, and Environmental Sustainability

The Mississippi River has the third-largest drainage basin, and this basin represents one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, yielding >80% of US total corn and soybean production and 92% of the nation’s agricultural exports. Large-scale industrial agriculture has led to significant socio-economic gains, but at environmental costs (soil erosion, nutrient pollution, and aquatic acidification) in this region. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) management practices have been proposed as solutions to this cost, as they not only increase crop yield, but also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and sustain soil and water quality. However, the effectiveness of CSA practices varies temporally and spatially under diverse climate and land use conditions and involves tightly coupled carbon, water, and nutrient cycles, and those interactions have not been well studied. This knowledge gap has hindered a thorough understanding and efficient application of CSA practices to achieve the three-fold benefits of enhancing food production, climate mitigation, and environmental sustainability. The overall goal of this project is to develop an integrated ecosystem monitoring, modeling, and machine learning (EcoM3) framework that incorporates field observations, satellite remote sensing data, process-based modeling, and deep learning approach to systematically investigate CSA (no-tillage and cover crops) effects on selected agroecosystem key indicators (crop yield, soil carbon storage, greenhouse gases, and carbon/nitrogen leaching) at multiple scales. This project will investigate CSA practices at the Blevins long-term field site in Kentucky (continuous observations over 50 years) as one testing site from daily to seasonal, annual, decadal scales; examine varied CSA impacts at multiple sites across different geographic locations (dry vs. wet; cool vs. warm) with diverse soil conditions; and predict the potential impact of CSA practices across the Mississippi River basin. Then multi-scale data and model results will be integrated into the learning platform of the EcoM3 framework to communicate temporal and spatial CSA effectiveness with diverse stakeholders. Intellectual Merit: This study addresses a challenging question: Will an enhanced systems approach advance our understanding of the interconnected relationships among agroecosystems, climate, and environment systems sufficiently to allow us to simultaneously manage multiple goals (food security, carbon sequestration, and environmental sustainability)? This study represents a systematic method to investigate the comprehensive effects of CSA practices at both site and regional scales under heterogeneous climate and soil conditions agricultural systems. The proposed EcoM3 framework incorporates CSA management that will advance our conceptual and operational understanding of interactions and feedback loops among climate, land use/management, and ecosystems. Products derived from this study will improve the mechanistic representation of the agroecosystem in Environmental SystemModels towards a more accurate prediction of biogeochemical cycles and future climate change, and will provide viable recommendations for farmers and a scientific basis for making evidence-informed policy-making about building a sustainable and climate-resilient agriculture. Broader Impacts: Our broader impacts will derive chiefly from formal and informal science education opportunities, outreach, and extension activities. The EcoM3 framework provides an interdisciplinary research and learning platform for early career researchers (undergraduates/graduates) and high-school education, thereby contributing to the development of next-generation human resources who understand and convey the complexity of climate-human-ecological systems. The project will foster participation in the STEM fields by supporting the UK See Blue STEM Camp program, with an emphasis on underrepresented populations. Research findings of CSA management practices will be communicated with farmers through local extension meetings and the Multi-state Farmer Summit (representatives across regions in Mississippi River basin). Project products will promote awareness about the importance of CSA management in building climate-resilient agroecosystems and preserving soil and water health. Multi-scale datasets will be made publicly available for research and education