Site-Specific Climate-Friendly Farming: Benefits and Challenges of Transdisciplinary Research.

The Site-Specific, Climate-Friendly Farming project aims to provide practical guidance for precision agriculture based upon fundamental research on the spatio-temporal variability of wheat-based cropping systems (hydrology, biogeochemistry, crop physiology, and economics) on the Palouse region of Eastern Oregon and Northern Idaho. Major components of this project include: (a) cropping systems experiments addressing nitrogen application rate and seeding density for different landscape positions; (b) greenhouse gas flux experiments and monitoring; (c) experiments to elucidate controls on soil biogeochemical and microbial processes; (d) proximal soil sensing for construction of detailed soil maps; (e) LiDAR and optical remote sensing for crop physiology monitoring; (f) hydrologic experiments, monitoring, and modeling; (g) refining the CropSyst simulation model to estimate site-specific biophysical processes and GHG emissions under a variety of management and climatic scenarios; and (h) farm-scale and site-specific economic analyses.

In this presentation, highlighting progress in year four of a five-year, $4.6 million project, we focus on the benefits and challenges of fundamental and applied transdisciplinary research, particularly as they apply to precision agriculture.