Going Beyond the Plot: Developing a Tool for Technology Extrapolation in Agriculture.

Ensuring adequate food production in systems that protect environmental quality and conserve natural resources requires acceleration in the rate of crop yield gains on existing farmland. Meeting this challenge will be difficult without a robust spatial framework that facilitates rapid evaluation and adoption of currently available and emerging technologies. Here we develop a global spatial framework to delineate ‘technology extrapolation domains’ based on key climate and soil factors that govern crop yields and yield stability in rainfed crop production. The proposed framework adequately represents the spatial pattern of crop yields and stability when evaluated over the data-rich US Corn Belt. The spatial framework is also shown to facilitate evaluation of cropping system performance across continents, which can improve efficiency of agricultural research that seeks to intensify production on existing farmland. The proposed spatial framework has potential to amplify the return on investments in agricultural research and development and contribute to research prioritization and impact assessment. The rest of the abstract will be completed before the deadline for editing on Aug 10, 2017.