Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Current Special Project

Agricultural soil erosion and carbon cycle observations in Iowa: Gaps threaten climate mitigating policies

Project ID: ESP2010-TP

This 3-year grant for $11,539 was awarded in 2010.

Location: Allamakee county

The central objective for this NASA EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) project is to quantify the links between land use/land cover, net CO2 emissions, and Soil Organic Carbon sequestration potential. The project will test the development of methods and models for carbon budgets at smaller regional scales to eventually provide a large-scale assessment of the carbon sink in the Midwest that may be attributed to an agricultural ecosystem. This grant was allocated as part of the three-year EPSCoR grant submitted to NASA by UNI. [Keywords: WEPP, CENTURY, CARBON, EROSION]

Thanos Papanicolaou

[Contact lead investigator]

Co-Investigator(s):

Ramanathan Sugumaran, Management PI, University of Northern Iowa

This special project is part of the Leopold Center's Ecology Initiative.

Topics: Corn-soybean cropping systems, Climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, Life Cycle Assessment, Conservation practices, Farming systems, Soils and agronomy, Watershed and ecoregion