Intellectual Merit

 The project is a collaboration between NCAR, the University of Illinois, Arizona State University, and the University of Kansas. The project seeks to improve our understanding of the joint consequences of socio-economic development and regional climate change by developing and applying tools to better integrate human and earth system models. Co-PI Jain and his research team has pursued this objective by focusing on impacts in two key systems – agriculture and forests.

As part of this project, we developed a global scale spatial dynamic land use allocation model (SDAM) that uses aggregate demand for land in large geographic regions as an input, and produces gridded land use as an output. This model is one component of the THESIS toolset developed under this project for the purpose of linking integrated assessment models (which operate ag the aggregate regional level) to land surface models, such as UIUC's ISAM (which operates at the grid cell level).

To evaluate and assess the uncertainty in impacts and adaptation measures and analyses of climate impacts on agriculture and forestry is carried out using ISAM land surface models. As part of this task, we implemented dynamic crop growth processes into ISAM. In particular, we implemented crop specific phenology schemes, which account for light, water, and nutrient stresses while allocating the assimilated carbon to leaf, root, stem and grain pools; dynamic vegetation structure growth, which better simulate the LAI and canopy height; dynamic root distribution processes in the soil layers, which better simulate the root response of soil water uptake and transpiration; and litter fall due to fresh and old dead leaves to better represent the water and energy interception by both stem and brown leaves of the canopy during leaf senescence. We also incorporated climate variability in ISAM to assess climatic impacts on crop yield.  The model is extensively evaluated with the measurement data. The model is also used for future food yield projections and food security assessment. In specific, we addressed two specific questions: (1) what are the synergistic effects of environmental and management factors on historical crop yields, and (2) how these effects change over the 21st century under future scenarios for environmental and management factors?

Broader Impacts

Project results are designed to benefit society more broadly by informing important decisions regarding the most effective response options for coping with anticipated impacts of climate change and variability on urban populations and agricultural systems. The toolset for human-earth system integration and its enhancement to the NCAR's CESM model will become part of the permanent infrastructure available to the research community. This project has supported one postdoc and four graduate students.  They helped in developing the land use change agriculture model and extended ISAM model include specific food crops in the model and applied the model future climate scenario analyses. The project outcomes include publications of 25 journal papers and 36 conference papers. Research on land cover and land use change and the interaction of agriculture crops with climate change have also been used in a graduate course at the University of Illinois. The students of these course gain hands-on experience on different land use modeling approaches currently available in the literature and impacts of climate change on the agriculture system.

Last Modified: 11/29/2019
Modified by: Atul K Jain