Team members Anna Zaytseva and Dan MacDonald have just wrapped up their participation at this year’s CMOS – CGU joint meeting. Most specifically, they were part of a special session on “Agroclimatic Extremes- Past, Present and Future.”
Anna shared her research (see CMOS2016_AnnaZaytseva) developing crop-specific phenological indicators of extreme weather impacts on crop production. Her work allows us to track how weather extremes such as droughts, floods, frost and extreme heat, occurring at different crop growth stages, can combine to negatively impact crop production.
Dan has lead the work to create a new spatial database of farming in our study area, which uses the Census of Agriculture along with actual physical features in the area, to represent realistic distributions of farm types and fields belonging to each farm. He also worked with Anna to integrate her research into a model of farm operations, which tracks decisions that need to made on farms each year, regarding what gets planted where, and how weather causes delays in that process. His slides are available here.