Integrating Multi-scale Remotely Sensed Data and Ecosystem Modelling to Assess Agroecosystem Carbon Dynamics and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Agroecosystems play an essential role in maintaining food security, ensuring environmental sustainability, and mitigating climate change. Achievement of the above goals requires full understanding of and systematical assessments of carbon budgets in agroecosystems and the attribution of impacts to global changes (e.g. climate and land use/management). Kentucky is a transition zone where carbon fluxes are potentially highly sensitive, and the state has recently experienced land use changes (grassland loss, deforestation, and crop expansion) and intensification of management (doubling to tripling of irrigation and nitrogen fertilizer use) over past decades. Current land uses (and their recent changes) position Kentucky as a test bed for studying a wide-range of carbon dynamics within agroecosystems and across interlined natural and managed ecosystems in the face of a changing environment. Our overall goal is to use NASA products and our advanced agroecosystem model to create detailed maps of agroecosystem carbon fluxes and GHG emissions for Kentucky during 1980- 2015. We will incorporate NASA’s multi-scale remote sensing data coupled with field observations and our numerical model. Project deliverables will help local policy-makers and land managers develop future carbon sequestration strategies as well as provide inputs for federally funded research aiming to improve soil health and water quality of our state and nation. In addition, our study will demonstrate the suitability of process-based ecosystem modeling for carbon and GHG assessment at large scales. RIA support will facilitate the organization of an interdisciplinary team for an intercomparison of multiple ecosystem models, focusing on the agroecosystem carbon cycle and GHG emissions. A successful demonstration in Kentucky will also pave the way for substantial leveraging through the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), which will attract in kind collaboration for Kentucky assessments involving AgMIP’s 1000+ member international network of transdisciplinary modelers, adaptation and mitigation planners, and applications experts.