Carbon, Climate and Managed Land in Ukraine: Integrating Data and Models of Land Use for the Northern Eurasian Earth Science Partnership Initiative (NEESPI)

A Research Project Funded by the NASA Land Use and Use Cover Program, 2005-2008.

In models that attempt to predict land-based carbon emissions, the interactions between carbon cycle, land use for agriculture, climate variability, and change need to be considered explicitly. To this end, it is necessary to improve biophysical descriptions of agricultural systems within existing ecosystem models, focusing on plant growth and yield as a function not only of climate, but also as a function of genetic and management factors, such as cultivar characteristics, irrigation and fertilization schedules, rotation types, soil management, etc. This research is driven by the following research questions: How will future climate variability and change impact agricultural production and terrestrial carbon cycling over the next decades? How will potential adaptation and mitigation strategies (new cultivars or crop type, changes in irrigation or fertilization regimes, land conversion, etc.) modify impacts and future carbon emissions, with respect to a climatic baseline?

Specifically, this project focuses on assessing over the next 30 years regional land use and agricultural productivity in Ukraine, a bread-basket of the former Soviet Union, whose land is intensively managed for agriculture. It uses a methodology for data and model integration, bringing together cropping systems, land use, carbon cycle, and climate modeling components using ground-based reported agriculture data as well as satellite-derived information. The proposed work to be developed at IIASA includes data analysis and AEZ development for the Ukraine, and is divided into three phases;

• First, integrate existing datasets on Ukrainian crop production, in order to include major crop types, management regimes, and production data from 1990 to present. The timeline of this component is March 2005–Feb 2006.
• Second, build a framework for model testing and development, based on: 1) Dynamic crop models simulations at experimental sites (Columbia Work Package); 2) Regional scaling using an agro-ecological zones (GAEZ) land-use model for crops; and 3) Climate change simulations produced with the GISS general circulation model (GCM). The timeline of this component is March 2006–Feb. 2007.
• Third, an explicit scale analysis — including downscaling techniques, inter-comparison between site-level and regional modeling results, and use of available remote-sensing imagery — will be employed to project regional climate impacts on agriculture, including adaptation and mitigation strategies. The timeline for this component is March 2007–Feb. 2008.

Responsible for this page: Elisabeth Kawczynski
Last updated: 09 Nov 2009