Agriculture and Complexity in the Argentine Pampas

Project presentation in Canada

2010-07-07T10:49:00.003-04:00

Federico Bert presented a paper at the International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software, 5-8 July 2010, Ottawa, Canada. The theme of the meeting was “Modelling for Environment's Sake,” and had the aim of enhancing environmental processes and decision making by fostering the discussion and interchange of challenges, solutions, ideas, new methods and techniques, and future research lines in environmental modelling and software.

Bert’s paper, titled “An agent-based land rental market for agricultural production in the Argentine Pampas,” introduces LARMA, a land rental market model with endogenous formation of Land Rental Price (LRP). As more of 50% of cropping in the Pampas take place on rented land, it is important to understand the dynamics of land price.

LARMA is a “hybrid” market model that relies partly on neoclassical economics for ease of design and implementation, but also addresses drawbacks of this approach by integrating the market model into an agent-based modeling framework. For instance, LARMA relaxes the assumption of a representative agent by considering agents with heterogeneous characteristics that may induce differences in the prices that agents are willing to pay or accept for land rental. Although LARMA still does not include bilateral trading between agents, it does involve other interactions (e.g., farmers monitor economic outcomes achieved by their peers) leading to adjustments in agents’ willingness to pay/accept certain land rental prices.

Coupled Human and Natural Systems sessions at geographers’ meeting

2010-04-30T10:20:00.002-04:00

The International Network of Research on Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS-Net), with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), hosted a series of CHANS events organized in conjunction with the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). CHANS-Net activities took place during the first three full days of the AAG Meeting (April 14-16. Activities included presentations and a workshop within the AAG meeting, a special event was held on the afternoon of Thursday, April 15th at NSF headquarters. See http://www.chans-net.org/cn_Newsandevents.aspx for more information.

This project was represented in the CHANS events through a presentation made by G. Podestá (and co-authored by several other project investigators) titled “Recent Changes in Agricultural systems of the Argentine Pampas.”

>> View abstract [PDF, 1926KB]

Meeting with IRI scientist

2010-03-29T10:06:00.000-04:00

Maru Skansi (Argentine Met Service) and G. Podesta met in Buenos Aires on 24 March 2010 with Dr. Lisa Goddard, from Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).

Dr. Goddard was in Buenos Aires to deliver several lectures in the 2010 Southwestern Hemisphere Workshop Series on Climate Change the Biosphere and Climate, jointly sponsored by the University of Buenos Aires’ School of Exact Sciences and NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid dynamics Laboratory ( see http://ictp2175.at.fcen.uba.ar/).

Presentations at meeting of the North American Association for Computational Social and Organization Sciences (NAACSOS)

2009-10-28T09:24:00.001-04:00

Project investigators made various presentations at the 2009 Annual Conference of the North American Association for Computational Social and Organization Sciences (NAACSOS). The meeting was hosted by the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity and the Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems of Arizona State University, Tempe/Phoenix, and took place on October 23-24, 2009.

Guillermo Podestá gave a talk (co-authored by several other project participants) titled “Dynamic adjustment of aspiration levels in agricultural systems of the Argentine Pampas.” The talk introduced the concept of an aspiration level (AL) as a special outcome separating results perceived as satisfactory or unsatisfactory, and described how an AL can feed various decision mechanisms in an agent-based model of land allocation.

Initial results from the project’s model of agricultural production in the Pampas was described in a second talk, “Agent-based simulation of recent changes in agricultural systems of the Argentine Pampas” (also with multiple authorship). Mike North (Argonne National Laboratory, ANL) introduced a new tool to link two modeling frameworks: NetLogo and Repast. Chick Macal (also from ANL) discussed agent-based and general equilibrium models of global oil markets. All investigators, including Pam Sydelko (ANL), took advantage of the meeting to discuss progress in the current CNH project.


Meeting organizers from Arizona State University	Pam Sydelko, Argonne National Laboratory

>> View presentation on aspiration level and land use decisions [PDF, 1926KB]

>> View presentation on results from agent-based model of agriculture in the Pampas [PDF, 1329 KB]

Project Investigator Kenny Broad is new director of Center For Ecosystem Science & Policy at the University of Miami

2009-10-16T16:17:00.000-04:00

Project co-investigator Kenny Broad has been named director of The Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy at the University of Miami. Established in 2005, the Center offers innovative undergraduate and graduate programs that allow students to integrate environmental science and policy into their educational experience, while emphasizing research and field work.

As an environmental anthropologist, Broad has directed major interdisciplinary research initiatives addressing diverse aspects of the relationship between humans and their environment.

The mission of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy is to create innovative, interdisciplinary initiatives that bridge the gap between science and environmental policy. The Center is the nexus for a new and flexible program that gives students the opportunity to learn in a problem-solving context and gain substantial field experience.

>> Get more info about the Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy

Project has strong presence in Argentine Meteorology Congress

2009-10-09T18:17:00.001-04:00

Several project investigators participated in the 10th Argentine Meteorological Congress, CONGREMET X, that took place in Buenos Aires, 5-9 October 2009.

Three posters were presented at a session on climate variability. Maru Skansi characterized the spatial extent and duration of the 2008 drought using the standarized precipitation index (SPI). Federico Bert presented a framework for exploring agricultural outcomes of plausible climate scenarios 25-30 years into the future. Yongku Kim, Rick Katz and Balaji Rajagopalan described an approach to enhance the generation of synthetic climate series by reducing “overdispersion.” Angel Menéndez made a presentation during a panel on water resources, and Claudia Natenzon led a panel on climate disasters and vulnerability.


Maru Skansi	Federico Bert

Angel Menéndez	Claudia Natenzon

>> View poster on 2008 drought in the Pampas [PDF, 1210KB]

>> View poster on framework to explore impacts of plausible climate 25 years hence [PDF, 2236KB]

>> View poster on Enhanced generation of synthetic climatic series [PDF, 2400KB]

Katz teaches intensive course on climate extremes at University of Buenos Aires

2009-10-09T08:04:00.001-04:00

Project investigator Rick Katz (National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado) taught an intensive one-day course on statistical modeling of extremes in climate change at the Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires. The course, which took place on October 2nd 2009, was attended by about 30 students and researchers from the University of Buenos Aires and other Argentine institutions, such as the National Met Service and the Navy Met Service.

The course covered the application of the statistical theory of extreme values to climate, in general, and to climate change, in particular. An innovative aspect was the incorporation of both trends and physically-based covariates into analysis of extremes.The course included two hands-on sessions using the library extRemes for extreme value analysis available within the open source statistical programming language R.


Rick Katz delivers one of the lectures	Dr. Celeste Saulo, Director of the Dept. of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences introduces the course

Course attendants listen to lectures	Hands-on exercises

>> Links to lectures and exercises

Bt Maize: A study of the adoption of technological innovations in agriculture

2009-07-13T10:24:00.001-04:00

This project aims to understand how technological innovations that will shape agriculture over the next decades are adopted by members of a social system. As part of this goal, Carolina Favre and Carlos Laciana analyzed the historical adoption in Argentina of “Bt maize”—genetically-modified maize tolerant to attacks by Lepidoptera larvae (caterpillars). Their work was published in the June 2009 issue of AACREA Magazine.

The area planted with Bt maize in Argentina grew quickly after its market introduction in 1998, and apparently stabilized at 60-65% of the total maize area since 2004/5, the most recent publically-available figure. However, there are differences in adoption between our two study regions. According to data from seed companies, Bt maize adoption in northern Córdoba was 80-90% in 2007/8, whereas the corresponding proportion was only 60-70% in northern Buenos Aires. Differences between sites are apparently associated with the higher frequency of late-planting dates (due to lower rainfall during the winter) in northern Córdoba. As summer progresses, the number of individuals in successive generations of stem-boring insects increases, therefore late-planted maize in Córdoba will be more likely to suffer damage.

Favre and Laciana also collected information about maize hybrids actually used by AACREA farmers and interviewed technical advisors for two CREA groups (details withheld due to privacy considerations). Even though both groups were in the same region—and thus shared agroecological conditions—their adoption patterns were quite different. Group A showed an earlier adoption of Bt maize, whereas Group B took much longer. The differences between groups may be tied to strong influence from each group’s technical advisor. In Group A, the technical advisor was the same throughout the period studied, and had a consistently positive opinion of the innovation. In contrast, the technical advisor who coordinated Group B until 2001 was not supportive of Bt technology, and this was reflected in a low proportion of adoption; when a new advisor arrived, most Group B members started using Bt technology. These results suggest that social interactions, and particularly opinions from a trusted, influential source such as a group advisor, can play a strong role in technology adoption trajectories.


Carolina Favre and Carlos Laciana, authors of the study on Bt maize adoption.

>> See the full article (in Spanish) [~1Mb]

Project participant Rajagopalan receives prestigious award

2009-06-15T12:45:00.000-04:00

All project participants want to extend warm congratulations to co-investigator Balaji Rajagopalan (Univ. of Colorado), who received the Norbert Gerbier-MUMM International Award 2009 together with co-authors K. Krishna Kumar (India), Martin Hoerling, Gary Bates, and Mark Cane (all from the USA) for their paper “Unravelling the mystery of Indian Monsoon failure during El Niño”, published in the journal Science in 2006. The award ceremony took place in Geneva on June 10, 2009, during the 61st session of the World Meteorological Organization’s Executive Council.

Geneva, 10 June 2009 — (from left to right): HE M.A. Gopinathan, Ambassador of India; A. Bedritsky, President of WMO; M. Jarraud, Secretary-General of WMO (back row); Mme G. Guiard Gerbier; B. Rajagopalan and K. Krishna Kumar

>> See online abstract of the winning paper

Complexity in human-natural systems: a symposium

2009-04-23T12:39:00.001-04:00

A special symposium on “Complexity in Human-Nature Interactions across Landscapes” was convened by Drs. Jack Liu and Bill McConnell (Michigan State University) as part of the 24th annual meeting of the U.S. Chapter of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (US IALE 2009), which took place in Snowbird, Utah, 12-16 April 2009. The Symposium included 17 invited talks form various projects funded by the National Science Foundation’s Coupled Natural and Human Systems program.

Guillermo Podestá presented a talk on “Agent-based simulation of recent changes in agricultural systems of the Argentine Pampas”, co-authored by 12 other project investigators (including two staff members of AACREA, the farming organization working with us in this project).

>> See Podestá ’s presentation (PDF, 2.1 MB)

Why were wheat yields so low in 2008/09?

2009-04-23T12:11:00.001-04:00

A previous blog entry discussed the severe drought in the Pampas. In an outreach article recently published in the AACREA Magazine (issue 342, April 2009), project investigators Maru Skansi, Federico Bert, and Fernando Ruiz Toranzo discuss the climate conditions prevailing during the winter cropping season of 2008/09. Poor conditions (initially dry soils, insufficient rainfall during crop growth, higher than average temperatures and late frosts) resulted in wheat yields that in many cases fell within 30-70% of average.

>> See the full article (PDF, 1.4 MB)

Elke Weber’s research highlighted by The New York Times

2009-04-20T16:00:00.000-04:00

An article in the “green issue” of the New York Times’ Magazine (published on April 16, 2009) highlights research by project participant Elke Weber and her colleagues at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED). The article, written by Jon Gertner, describes the current state of research on climate change decision science.

In particular, the article mentions a research experiment on group decisions being conducted simultaneously in New York, Amsterdam and Argentina. In the experiments, a few (3-5) subjects deal with several quandaries. The first involves reaching a consensus on how to apply $5 billion worth of federal funds to wind-energy technologies. Should they spend it all on conventional wind turbines? Should they invest some (or all) of the money on an as-yet-unproven technology that would employ magnetic levitation to create a huge, long-lasting, superefficient wind-powered generator? After the group comes to a consensus in each of the test segments, members are asked to figure out their own individual decisions.

In Argentina, AACREA farmers from different regions are involved in the group decisions. The experiment, being coordinated by Fernando Ruiz Toranzo, will provide insights that will enhance modeling of decisions in the NSF-sponsored project.

Severe drought in Argentina

2009-03-26T17:25:00.001-04:00

Project participants Maru Skansi and Silvia Núñez from Argentina’s Meteorological Service prepared a report on the recent drought conditions in the Argentine Pampas. During 2008, total precipitations ranged between 40 and 60 percent of “normal” values (1961-1990).

The severe drought has had large negative impacts on Argentina’s mostly rainfed agriculture. According to newspaper Ámbito Financiero (24 February 2009) the 2008-2009 production of wheat, soybean, maize and sunflower is estimated at 64.4 million tons, a decrease of 24.8 million tons with respect to the previous cycle. The economic impact of this decrease is about 6200 million dollars, or 2.2% of Argentina’s GDP.

The spatial extent and severity of the drought is described by the 12-month Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) for February 2009), which places in context cumulative rainfall anomalies since March 2008. The SPI, implemented by the Met Service with support from this project, shows very dry or extremely dry conditions over most of central-eastern Argentina.

More information about the SPI…

Workshop on land use changes, biofuels and rural development in the Plata Basin

2009-03-16T13:22:00.000-04:00

Carolina Favre (Argentine M.S. student funded by the IAI) attended a workshop of social scientists from Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia collaborating in a project on land use and biofuels in the Río de la Plata Basin funded by the IAI and Canada’s International Development Research Center (IDRC). The workshop took place in Tandil, Argentina, on May 9-13, 2009.

Carolina presented a summary of progress in our agent-based model of changes in land use and structure of production systems in the Argentine Pampas. She also had an intense and productive exchange of ideas with workshop participants in preparation for her own thesis work on land use changes in the Argentine Chaco.


Group picture of workshop participants	Participants interviewed farmers from the Tandil region

Argentine researchers visit Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Miami

2009-03-16T07:24:00.000-04:00

Federico Bert (School of Agronomy) and Santiago Rovere (School of Engineering), both at the University of Buenos Aires visited project colleagues at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) outside Chicago. During the week of March 2-6, 2009, Santiago and Federico worked with ANL’s Mike North and Eric Tatara on the design and implementation of the second phase of the project’s agent-based model of agricultural production in the Pampas. This phase will involve endogenous formation of land rental prices in the Pampas, as well as a GIS space for visualization of model output.

After their stay at ANL, Santiago and Federico spent a week visiting project participants at the University of Miami. They met with Don Olson to explore if the agent model and a systems dynamics model (i.e., two different approaches) arrive at similar results. They also met with Dave Krantz (visiting from Columbia University), Kenny Broad and Bob Meyer who provided useful advice on decision-making mechanisms.


Santiago Rovere, Mike North and Federico Bert in Chicago.	Federico Bert at the entrance of ANL’s Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation.

Dave Krantz (Columbia Univ.), Kenny Broad and Bob Meyer (Univ. of Miami), Santiago Rovere and Federico Bert.	Santiago Rovere and Federico Bert meet with Don Olson.

“How to travel without leaving home”

2008-12-01T15:09:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-11T12:26:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-01T21:55:00.000-04:00

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

2008-11-01T20:17:00.000-04:00

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

2008-10-01T19:46:00.000-04:00

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

2008-09-15T17:00:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-31T19:50:00.000-04:00

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

2008-07-15T19:51:00.000-04:00

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

2008-06-24T10:20:00.000-04:00

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

2008-06-01T15:10:00.000-04:00

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?

2008-03-31T10:17:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-14T19:49:00.000-04:00

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

2008-03-01T18:57:00.000-05:00

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

2008-03-01T18:46:00.001-05:00

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?

2008-03-01T18:46:00.000-05:00

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.