ABE Seminar Featuring Kaiyu Guan
ISRC sponsored seminar - ISU Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Seminar featuring Professor Kaiyu Guan, University of Illinois via Zoom
Topic: Advancing Agricultural Research in the Earth System Science Framework
Talk Abstract & Bio
Agricultural research and Earth System Science (ESS) evolved largely independently in the past decades. We must now unite these two communities to address fundamental societal interests: food security, climate change mitigation/adaptation, environmental sustainability, farmer/industry solutions, and policymaking. Diverse agricultural systems, data collection limits, conventional emphasis on empirical studies, and near-singular focus on crop yield challenge the integration of agricultural research into ESS. The intrinsic connection between agriculture and society demands a nuanced understanding from localized farming practices to national policy design. Achieving synergy requires distinct expertise, universally accepted assumptions, and solution-driven agricultural research. Only then will we achieve real-world outcomes.
I envision three distinct themes drive this integration. Theme 1 employs scalable sensing and measurement networks to holistically characterize farms, their environment, and resource limitations. The collected data will fill knowledge gaps and robustly predict agricultural outcomes covering both productivity and environmental impacts. Theme 2 develops new modeling tools (process modeling, artificial intelligence) that will use these data in collaboration with research in ESS to predict agricultural outcomes under various management practices at individual field levels, with the ability to scale to entire watersheds and nations. Theme 3 integrates socio-economic-policy into cutting-edge agricultural research, to create a use-inspired research agenda with real-world impacts to accelerate adoption of novel technologies and to enable effective policy design. Collectively, these themes make up our vision for including agricultural research into the ESS paradigm.
I will use much work that we and our collaborators have done in the past decade for the US Midwest Corn-Soybean systems as examples to illustrate the above points, hoping to simulate more discussions and collaborations among diverse researchers from Iowa, the whole Midwest, and beyond. I sincerely thank the Department of Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University for this invitation and the Iowa Soybean Research Center for sponsoring this event.
Short Biography for Dr. Kaiyu Guan:
Dr. Kaiyu Guan is a Professor in agroecosystem sensing and modeling at UIUC, a Blue-Waters Professor in Supercomputing at UIUC-NCSA, a University Scholar of the University of Illinois System, the Founding Director of Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) at UIUC, and also the Chief Scientist of the NASA Acres Consortium - representing NASA's flagship program in advancing US agriculture research. His major affiliations at UIUC are with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES), Siebel School of Computing and Data Sciences (CS), College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). His research group uses advanced process models, satellite sensing technology, fieldwork, and artificial intelligence to address how climate and human practices affect crop productivity, water resource, ecosystem functioning, and environmental sustainability. His group has specific interests in applying knowledge and skills in solving real-life problems, such as large-scale crop monitoring and forecasting, quantification of greenhouse gas emission, agricultural policy design, water management and sustainability, and global food security. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most recently the James B. Macelwane Medal and election as Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. More details about Dr. Kaiyu Guan can be found here: http://faculty.nres.illinois.edu/~kaiyuguan/