“How to travel without leaving home”

Claudia Natenzon and Cecilia Hidalgo presented a talk titled “Redes de conocimiento o cómo desplazarse sin salir de casa” [Knowledge networks, or how to travel without leaving home] at the international seminar “Diásporas y Circulación de Talentos,” organized by the French Embassy in Argentina, the Institut de recherche pour le développement, and the University of Buenos Aires. The seminar took place in Buenos Aires on 27-28 November 2008.

Claudia and Cecilia’s paper focused on how virtual collaboration networks can facilitate interdisciplinary research by significantly reducing time and expenses associated with travel.

Preparing Ph.D. Graduates for Climate-Change Careers

Federico Bert (Facultad de Agronomía, Universidad de Buenos Aires) participated in the 2008 edition of the Dissertations Initiative for the Advancement of Climate Change Research (DISCCRS), that took place in the Tonto National Forest outside Phoenix, Arizona on November 2-9, 2008.

DISCCRS is aimed at early career Ph.D.-level researchers and aims to catalyze the formation of collegial interdisciplinary interactions. The 2008 DISCCRS Symposium involved 34 early-career scholars from 10 different countries (see photo below). Participants received training through keynote presentations, experiential learning, small group exercises and informal interactions. Skills emphasized were those deemed essential to effective interdisciplinary work: communication, interpersonal and team development skills,

For more information about DISCCRS, visit the project’s WWW site, which also includes career resources on topics such as professional development, job hunting, proposal writing and other topics.

Plenary meeting of Argentine project participants

A plenary meeting of Argentine researchers and stakeholders participating in this project took place in Buenos Aires on 31 October 2008. The meeting was held at the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Asociación Argentina de Consorcios Regionales de Experimentación Agrícola (AACREA).

Modeling Applications for Decision Support in Agriculture

Guillermo Podestá, project coordinator, attended a workshop intended to introduce researchers, practitioners and stakeholders to the application of modeling and climate forecasting as a strategy to mitigate production risks associated with climate variability and change. The workshop took place at the University of Passo Fundo, Brazil, October 28-30, 2008.

The workshop was part of the activities of project “Decision Support System for Risk Reduction in Agriculture – Phase II: Soybean DSS for Eastern Paraguay and Rio Grande do Sul”, supported by the Small Grant Program of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). Our CNH project is collaborating with this project.

>> See presentation by Podestá (PDF, 2473 KB)

New NCAR postdoc joins the project

Dr. Yongku Kim has joined the project as a postdoctoral researcher at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Yongku is from South Korea and he received M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) degrees in Statistics from The Ohio State University. Yongku will be working with project investigators Rick Katz from NCAR and Balaji Rajagopalan from the Univ. of Colorado (left). He will explore the use of stochastic weather generators based on General Linear Models (GLMs) to downscale projected trends in precipitation in the Pampas. He also will explore whether dry and wet epochs in the Pampas can be modeled using Hidden Markov Models.

Bert gives talk at MundoAgro 2008

Federico Bert gave an invited talk during the 2008 edition of MundoAgro, held on 11-12 September 2008 in Mar del Plata, Argentina. MundoAgro is a major event in the Argentine agribusiness community, and is attended by over 1500 farmers and technical advisors linked with agricultural production in Argentina. The scientific agenda of the event was coordinated by Dr. Emilio Satorre, another investigator in this project.

Bert’s presentation was titled “Current and future responses to climate variability: possible impacts on cropping outcomes” and focused on the potential impacts of decadal climate variability on agricultural production systems in the Pampas. He showed that the recent expansion of agricultural production in the Pampas (associated with both increased precipitation and enhanced technologies). This was Bert's second consecutive participation in MundoAgro: in the 2007 edition he talked about year-to-year climate variability and its links with crop production.

  >> See Bert’s presentation at MundoAgro 2008 (PDF, 1,560KB)

After the talk, Federico was interviewed by AgroTV, an Argentine cable television channel focused on agricultural production. The 8-minute interview [in Spanish] can be seen below.

UK researcher explores possible collaboration on coupled natural/human systems

Dr. Mark Reed, an expert on environmental management and stakeholder participation, visited the University of Miami (UM) in early July of 2008 to explore possible areas of collaboration with UM researchers participating in the NSF-sponsored Argentina project. Mark was at the time affiliated with the Sustainability Research Institute of the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, although he has since taken a position at the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Aberdeen (Scotland).

During the visit, he met with Guillermo Podesta, Dave Letson and Kenny Broad. Various areas of collaboration where complementation and synergies could be achieved were identified, and a joint report was prepared for UK and US science funding agencies.

Mark Reed (left) with Dave Letson	Mark meets with Kenny Broad

David Letson works with Argentine colleagues on the value of climate information

Dave Letson, a resource economist at the University of Miami, visited Buenos Aires in July 2008 to work with Argentine collaborators. His visit focused on the estimation of the economic value of imperfect climate forecasts.

Dave’s visit coincided with the annual farm show, the largest in south America.

Climate and maize production

Federico Bert and Guillermo Podestá wrote the chapter “Variabilidad climática y toma de decisiones en el cultivo de maíz” [Climate variability and decision-making in maize cropping systems] for a handbook on maize production published by AACREA. The handbook, coordinated by project investigator Emilio Satorre, is intended to bring the latest developments in maize production to farmers, technical advisors, and Agronomy students in Argentina.

>> Read chapter on climate and maize production (PDF, 2302KB)

Talk on interdisciplinary collaboration at international meeting

Dr. Cecilia Hidalgo (School of Philosophy, Univ. of Buenos Aires) presented a paper at ESOCITE 2008, an international meeting on social studies of science and technology. The meeting, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 28-30 May 2008, attracted hundreds of international experts on studies of science, technology and its relations hip to society.

The paper presented by Cecilia (co-authored by Claudia Natenzon, Kenny Broad and Guillermo Podesta) was titled “Changing views of the success of interdisciplinary research.” It described how criteria of success shifted during the course of the first 3-year project on climate and agriculture funded by NSF in Argentina.

>> Get a copy of the paper (PDF, 290KB)

What do farmers think about climate?

Andrés Barsky, an Argentine geographer collaborating in the project, conducted interviews with 60 AACREA farmers in the two study regions (north of Buenos Aires and north of Córdoba). The goal was to assess (a) what farmers knew about climate of their region, (b) what they did not know, and (c ) what they thought they knew, but was not correct.

As a result of these interviews, a series of knowledge gaps and misunderstandings were identified. These gaps were addressed in an article titled “Cómo hacer del pronóstico climático una herramienta útil” [How to turn a climate forecast into a useful tool], published in the  April 2008 issue of the AACREA magazine.

>> See full text of article (PDF, 1644 KB)

Mike North visits Buenos Aires

During March 7-12, 2008, Dr. Mike North visited Buenos Aires to interact with Argentine project participants. Mike is Deputy Director of the Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation at Argonne National Laboratory, and an expert in design and implementation of agent-based models.

Topics discussed during the visit included (a) ABM coding standards, (b) validation of ABMs, (c) evolution towards a full land rental market (currently the model includes an exogenous rental price).

During his visit to Buenos Aires, Mike had a chance to sample Argentine gastronomy.

Geographer will investigate agricultural technology adoption

Carolina Favre is a new member of the project team. Trained as a geographer at the University of Buenos Aires, she will explore historical patterns of adoption of agricultural innovations.

Carolina will focus on the adoption of Bt maize, a variant of maize, genetically altered to express the bacterial Bt toxin, which is poisonous to insect pests. In the case of maize, the pest is the European Corn Borer.  The European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis, destroys corn crops by burrowing into the stem, causing the plant to fall over.

Undergraduate Engineering student joins the team

Santiago Rovere, a student at the University of Buenos Aires' School of Engineering has joined the research team. Santiago will do research for his undergraduate thesis on the diffusion of technical innovations through social networks. Santiago expects to complete his thesis in early 2009.

As Santiago is an experienced Java programmer, he will also participate in the implementation of the project's agent-based model of Argentine agricultural production systems.

What is this blog?

This blog provides information about a research project to understand and model the dynamic interactions of natural and human components in agricultural ecosystems. The focus is on agricultural production systems in the Pampas of central-eastern Argentina. The Pampas are one of the major cereal and oilseed production areas of the world.

The project places special emphasis on assessing the scope for active adaptive management in response to new knowledge such as climate information and insights on human decision-making. Highlights of the project include:

• A strong focus on understanding the dynamics of human behavior and decisions in the context of a real-world complex natural/human system;
• A diverse and well-balanced team of investigators and outreach specialists from the United States and Argentina that draws equally from a range of disciplines; and
• The active involvement of farmers and operational producers of climate information who ensure the relevance of the research and stakeholders’ ownership of the process.