Award Abstract # 1360463
WSC-Catergory 2 Collaborative: Impacts of Agricultural Decision Making and Adaptive Management on Food Security

NSF Org: SES
Division of Social and Economic Sciences
Recipient: TRUSTEES OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: August 5, 2014
Latest Amendment Date: September 18, 2017
Award Number: 1360463
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Robert O'Connor
roconnor@nsf.gov
 (703)292-7263
SES
 Division of Social and Economic Sciences
SBE
 Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
Start Date: September 1, 2014
End Date: June 30, 2018 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $1,862,385.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $2,058,374.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2014 = $1,077,487.00
FY 2015 = $0.00
History of Investigator:
  • Tom Evans (Principal Investigator)
    tomevans@email.arizona.edu
  • Shahzeen Attari (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Inna Kouper (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Beth Plale (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Indiana University
107 S INDIANA AVE
BLOOMINGTON
IN  US  47405-7000
(317)278-3473
Sponsor Congressional District: 09
Primary Place of Performance: Indiana University
701 E. Kirkwood Ave.
Bloomington
IN  US  47405-7100
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
09
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): YH86RTW2YVJ4
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): International Research Collab,
CR-Water Sustainability & Clim,
Sustainable Energy Pathways
Primary Program Source: 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 004Z, 5991, 7402, 9179
Program Element Code(s): 729800, 797700, 802600
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.075

ABSTRACT

Despite significant attention from governments, donor agencies, and NGOs, food security remains an unresolved challenge in the context of global human welfare. Both technical and conceptual limits have prevented the collection and analysis of rich empirical datasets with high temporal frequency over large spatial extents necessary to investigate how changes to seasonal precipitation patterns are affecting food security. This research project will transform both methodological and conceptual frameworks for assessing the sustainability of dryland agricultural systems. The research will bring new understanding of how dryland farmers adapt to within-season variability in climate and how those adaptations affect their current and future resilience to climate variability and climate change. Project findings will improve forecast models used to monitor and predict the sustainability of water-dependent agricultural systems. By marrying the simple idea of cell phone adoption with state-of-art research in data science, crop prediction, and environmental/social monitoring, the project will advance and accelerate scientific understanding of an important global sustainability problem.

This project will focus on characterizing the nature and impact of intra-seasonal smallholder decision making on adaptation to climate variability in semi-arid agricultural systems. Specifically, the research addresses three critical research questions: (1) How do intra-seasonal dynamics of both the environment and social systems shape farmer adaptive capacity? (2) To what extent does intra-seasonal decision making enable farmers to adapt to climate uncertainty? and (3) How can intra-seasonal data improve the ability to model, predict, and improve adaptation to climate variability in ways that enhance food security? The research team will integrate physical models of hydrological and agricultural dynamics with real-time environmental data and weekly farmer decision making in individual fields. These real-time data are obtained from previously-developed novel cellular-based environmental sensing pods coupled to real-time reports of farmer decision making submitted via cell phones. The team will use a combination of environmental and social data to develop a suite of modeling tools for understanding how climate variability impacts the sustainability of agricultural systems in the study regions. The research team also will develop modeling tools for improved forecasts of food security capable of producing new understandings of the intra-seasonal dynamics of both social and environmental processes. Although the test bed for this research is the Southern Province of Zambia and portions of the Rift Valley and Central Provinces of Kenya centered around the Laikipia District, the results may well be broadly applicable to other semi-arid and arid regions of the world.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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(Showing: 1 - 10 of 21)
Baldwin, E., Washington-Ottombre, C., Dell' Angelo, J., Cole, D. and Evans, T. "Polycentric Governance and Irrigation Reform in Kenya" Governance , 2015
Baldwin, E., Washington-Ottombre, W., Dell'Angelo, J., Cole, D. and Evans, TP "Polycentric Water Governance in Response to Failures of Centralized Irrigation Policy in Kenya" Governance , 2015 , p.207
Debats, S., Luo, D., Estes, L.D., Fuchs, T, Caylor, K.K "A generalized computer vision approach to mapping agricultural fields in heterogeneous landscapes" Remote Sensing of Environment , v.2016 , 2016 doi:10.1016/j.rse.2016.03.010
Debats, S.R., Estes, L.D., Thompson, D.R. & Caylor, K.K. "Integrating active learning and crowdsourcing into large-scale supervised landcover mapping algorithms" PeerJ Preprints , 2017
Debats, Stephanie R., Luo, D., Estes, L.D., Fuchs, T.J., Caylor, K.K. "A generalized computer vision approach to mapping crop fields in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes" Remote Sensing of Environment , v.179 , 2016 , p.210
Dell' Angelo, J., McCord, P., Gower, D., Carpenter, S., Caylor, K. and Evans, T. "Revisiting Institutional Design Principles for Community-Based Water Management: The Case of Mount Kenya" Mountain and Research Development , 2016
Dell?Angelo, J., McCord, P., Gower, D., Carpenter, S., Caylor, K., Evans, TP "Community Water Governance on Mount Kenya: An Assessment Based on Ostrom?s Design Principles of Natural Resource Management" Mountain Research and Development , v.36 , 2016 , p.102
Estes, L.D., McRitchie, D., Choi, J., Debats, S., Evans, T., Guthe, W., Luo, D., Ragazzo, G., Zempleni, R. & Caylor, K.K. "A platform for crowdsourcing the creation of representative, accurate landcover maps" Environmental Modelling & Software , v.80 , 2016 , p.41 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.01.011
Estes, L.D., McRitchie, D., Choi, J., Debats, S., Evans, T.P., Guthe, W., Luo, D., Ragazzo, G., Zempleni, R. & Caylor, K.K. "A platform for crowdsourcing the creation of representative, accurate landcover maps" Environmental Modelling & Software , v.80 , 2016 , p.41
Estes, L.D., Searchinger, T., Spiegel, M., Tian, D., Sichinga, S., Mwale, M., Kehoe, L., Kuemmerle, T., Berven, A., Chaney, N., Sheffield, J., Wood, E.F. & Caylor, K.K. "Reconciling agriculture, carbon and biodiversity in a savannah transformation frontier" Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B , v.371 , 2016 , p.20150316
Gower, D., Dell?Angelo, J., McCord, P., Evans, TP. and Caylor, K "Ecohydrological dynamics of smallholder strategies for food production in dryland agricultural systems" Environmental Research Letters , v.11 , 2016 https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/11/11/115005
(Showing: 1 - 10 of 21)

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