WSC-Category 2 Collaborative: Impacts of Agricultural Decision Making and Adaptive Management on Food Security

尽管各国政府、捐助机构和非政府组织给予了极大的关注，但粮食安全仍然是全球人类福祉面临的一个尚未解决的挑战。 由于技术和概念上的限制，无法收集和分析在大空间范围内具有高时间频率的丰富经验数据集，而这些数据集是调查季节性降水模式变化如何影响粮食安全所必需的。 这一研究项目将改变评估旱地农业系统可持续性的方法和概念框架。 这项研究将使人们对旱地农民如何适应季节内的气候变化以及这些适应如何影响他们目前和今后对气候变异和气候变化的适应能力有新的认识。 项目研究结果将改进用于监测和预测依赖水的农业系统可持续性的预测模型。 通过将手机应用的简单理念与数据科学、作物预测和环境/社会监测领域的最新研究相结合，该项目将推进和加速对一个重要的全球可持续性问题的科学理解。该项目将重点关注半干旱农业系统中季节内小农决策的性质和影响，以适应气候变化。具体而言，本研究解决了三个关键的研究问题：（1）环境和社会系统的季节内动态如何塑造农民的适应能力？(2)季节内决策在多大程度上使农民能够适应气候的不确定性？以及（3）季节内数据如何能够以增强粮食安全的方式提高对气候变化的建模、预测和适应能力？ 该研究小组将把水文和农业动态的物理模型与实时环境数据和个别田地的每周农民决策相结合。 这些实时数据是从先前开发的新型基于蜂窝的环境传感吊舱中获得的，这些环境传感吊舱与通过手机提交的农民决策的实时报告相结合。 该团队将结合环境和社会数据开发一套建模工具，以了解气候变化如何影响研究区域农业系统的可持续性。 该研究小组还将开发建模工具，以改进对粮食安全的预测，从而对社会和环境过程的季节内动态产生新的理解。虽然这项研究的试验田是赞比亚的南部省和肯尼亚以莱基皮亚区为中心的裂谷和中部省的部分地区，但研究结果很可能广泛适用于世界上其他半干旱和干旱地区。

Despite significant attention from governments, donor agencies, and NGOs, food security remains an unresolved challenge in the context of global human welfare. Both technical and conceptual limits have prevented the collection and analysis of rich empirical datasets with high temporal frequency over large spatial extents necessary to investigate how changes to seasonal precipitation patterns are affecting food security. This research project will transform both methodological and conceptual frameworks for assessing the sustainability of dryland agricultural systems. The research will bring new understanding of how dryland farmers adapt to within-season variability in climate and how those adaptations affect their current and future resilience to climate variability and climate change. Project findings will improve forecast models used to monitor and predict the sustainability of water-dependent agricultural systems. By marrying the simple idea of cell phone adoption with state-of-art research in data science, crop prediction, and environmental/social monitoring, the project will advance and accelerate scientific understanding of an important global sustainability problem.This project will focus on characterizing the nature and impact of intra-seasonal smallholder decision making on adaptation to climate variability in semi-arid agricultural systems. Specifically, the research addresses three critical research questions: (1) How do intra-seasonal dynamics of both the environment and social systems shape farmer adaptive capacity? (2) To what extent does intra-seasonal decision making enable farmers to adapt to climate uncertainty? and (3) How can intra-seasonal data improve the ability to model, predict, and improve adaptation to climate variability in ways that enhance food security? The research team will integrate physical models of hydrological and agricultural dynamics with real-time environmental data and weekly farmer decision making in individual fields. These real-time data are obtained from previously-developed novel cellular-based environmental sensing pods coupled to real-time reports of farmer decision making submitted via cell phones. The team will use a combination of environmental and social data to develop a suite of modeling tools for understanding how climate variability impacts the sustainability of agricultural systems in the study regions. The research team also will develop modeling tools for improved forecasts of food security capable of producing new understandings of the intra-seasonal dynamics of both social and environmental processes. Although the test bed for this research is the Southern Province of Zambia and portions of the Rift Valley and Central Provinces of Kenya centered around the Laikipia District, the results may well be broadly applicable to other semi-arid and arid regions of the world.