Towards an Integrated Agroecosystem Modeling Approach for Climate-Smart Agricultural Management.

Agricultural land use and management practices are recognized as one of the most important contributors to climate change and variability, while changing climate has made tremendous impacts on agricultural production, sparking concern over food security at regional and global scales. Climate-smart agriculture presented by FAO is for achieving sustainable agricultural development for food security under climate change. To achieve the goal of climate-smart agriculture, it is an urgent need to enhance our understanding of and promote our capability to quantitatively investigate the whole agroecosystem responses to global changes. It requires systematic information and a full assessment regarding plant growth, food production and associated environmental consequences (i.e. greenhouse gas fluxes, water quality etc.) in responses to climate change and diverse management practices. Agroecosystem modelling approaches such as traditional crop models and biogeochemical models etc. have been greatly improved to understand, assess and predict agroecosystem processes and exchanges (water, carbon, nutrients) across soil-plant-atmosphere interfaces. Here, this study presents the framework of an integrated agroecosystem modeling approach and its development over the past decade. Two case studies are provided showing how to apply the improved integrated agroecosystem model to synthesize multi-source datasets and quantify the whole system responses (plant and soil) for climate-smart agriculture related studies: 1) examination of changes in crop production and global warming potential (GWP) of China’s croplands as influenced by multiple global environmental factors (climate, intensive land use change and management practices etc.); and 2) investigation of century-scale dynamics of the carbon fluxes (crop productivity, carbon emission and export) in agricultural land across the Mississippi River basin, USA.