Working farms cover much of the United States, providing food, feed, and biofuel to global markets. Changing weather patterns and land use are making it more difficult to manage agricultural lands for profit and environmental health. Midwestern field crop farmers are quick to note that changes in rainfall patterns are playing havoc with their management. The Midwest is experiencing more overall rainfall during the growing season, but it comes in heavier rain events. Climate scientists warn that this trend is likely to continue, or even get worse, and that we may well see more intense dry periods between these heavy rains. How can agricultural landscapes be made more resilient in the face of these extreme conditions? The next phase of the Kellogg Biological Station Long-term Ecological Research program tackles this question. Scientists will explore what aspects of the environment (above and belowground) help agricultural landscapes resist and recover from intense droughts and how drought effects interact with changes in land use. Scientists from many disciplines will work together to uncover the role of plants, soils, microbes, insects, time, and farmers in providing buffering capacity to agricultural lands. The research will focus on annual field crops, perennial grasslands, and natural areas that make up much of the agricultural landscape across the Midwest. The experiments will provide new insights into how environments respond to change. Discoveries will inform the policies, programs, and management of agricultural and natural environments across the world.
Long-term experiments and observations will be maintained and complemented with new experiments that simulate growing-season droughts and add prairie strips within row crop fields. The new experiments will test the importance of three classes of hypothesized resilience mechanisms: resource availability (soil resources and social resources), diversity (including species richness and intraspecific genetic diversity), and adaptation (both biological and technological). By examining mechanisms of resilience in each major land use in our spatial domain – annual crops, perennial biomass crops, and successional and conservation lands – the researchers will lay the foundation for understanding how changing land use and climate will interact to affect ecosystem functions. Farmer surveys to be conducted over the course of the project will reveal how managers’ decision-making adapts to environmental change and thereby contributes to resilience. This research uniquely examines biogeochemical, ecological, evolutionary, and social dimensions of resilience in agricultural systems and landscapes.
This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
