Impacts of Agricultural Decision Making and Adaptive Management on Food Security

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. Working with collaborators at UC Santa Barbara and Indiana University, researchers will integrate physical models of hydrological and agricultural dynamics with real-time environmental data obtained from previously-developed novel cellular-based environmental sensing pods and real-time reports of farmer decision making submitted via cell phones. 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? (3) How can intra-seasonal data improve the ability to model, predict, and improve adaptation to climate variability in ways that enhance food security?