By Grant Guggisberg
MANHATTAN — A Kansas State University Carl R. Ice College of Engineering researcher aims to ensure the sustainability of Kansas water resources in crop production by creating a tool that can generate future climate scenarios and allow producers the knowledge and insight needed to adjust toward climate-smart practices.
Vaishali Sharda, assistant professor in the Carl and Melinda Helwig Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, has received a more than $500,000 National Science Foundation Early Career Development Program award, known as a CAREER award, to develop and refine these models.
The five-year project, "CAS-Climate: Multiscale Data and Model Synthesis Informed Approach for Assessing Climate Resilience of Crop Production Systems," intends to create an all-in-one system that can help crop producers better sustain water resources, as well as manage nutrients and soils, by combining inputs from on-the-ground sensors and satellite and remotely sensed data.
“Ensuring the sustainability of water resources, especially under a changing climate and increasingly extreme weather conditions, necessitates a shift in farming practices," Sharda said. "There is a need to integrate scientific and engineering expertise, assess a range of scenarios and develop resilience metrics to prolong the viability of nonrenewable water resources."
The project will build research and educational capacity for developing and refining modeling capabilities across different scales in space and time by linking a variety of data sources with a novel modeling framework capable of generating multiple outcomes for crop production under future climate scenarios.