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(From Wired Magazine, Oct. 14)

IN JACK'S SOLAR Garden in Boulder County, Colorado, owner Byron Kominek has covered 4 of his 24 acres with solar panels. The farm is growing a huge array of crops underneath them—carrots, kale, tomatoes, garlic, beets, radishes, lettuce, and more. It’s also been generating enough electricity to power 300 homes. “We decided to go about this in terms of needing to figure out how to make more money for land that we thought should be doing more,” Kominek says.

Several doctoral students in the ACE department are completing their studies soon and starting to search for their next professional adventures. We want to highlight their research and show you a glimpse of how much energy, effort, and support they bring to our group. This month we share profiles of two such students: Chang Cai and Noé Nava.

My research interests focus on issues related to parks, outdoor recreation, and adaptation to climate change and extreme events. I’m currently working to understand how tourists perceive and respond to raging wildfires and thick smoke in national parks. My research frequently explores the use of interesting geospatial data and leverages the tools of causal inference and machine learning. Beyond academia, I am an avid hiker.

What work are you most proud of from your time at UIUC?

The $15 million Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) will receive the funding over five years as part of the National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution, which establishes five institutes across the United States to explore questions at the frontiers of science and engineering. I-GUIDE will enable geospatial data-driven scientific discovery at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the resulting research will lead to better understanding of the risks and impacts of climate change and disasters.

CEOS Co-Director Amy Ando is a Senior Personnel researcher  on the grant and will largely contribute to two tasks:

1. Assess sustainability of water management infrastructure.

USDA NIFA granted $10 million towards diversifying Midwest farms to support agricultural resilience. CEOS researcher Benjamin Gramig is on the team of researchers led by Purdue University. The core goal of this project, #DiverseCornBelt: Resilient Intensification through Diversity in Midwestern Agriculture, is to diversify the farms, landscapes, and markets of the Corn Belt. Diversifying crop production and markets will generate a suite of economic, social, and ecosystem services that benefit more people than provided by the current system of predominantly corn-soybean rotations and confined livestock. Diversifying both farming and farmers in the U.S. requires systematic analysis and assessment of pathways towards resilient intensification at farm, landscape, and market levels. The team will implement a transdisciplinary integrated approach to coproduce new scientifically and ethically sound visions through objectives that cuts across research, Extension, and education.

Urbana, Ill. — The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced funding for a new project led by iSEE Interim Director Madhu Khanna to optimize design for “agrivoltaic” systems — fields with both crops and solar panels — that will maintain crop production, produce renewable energy, and increase farm profitability.

This $10 million, four-year project, funded through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Sustainable Agriculture Systems program with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as the lead institution, will study agrivoltaics in a variety of land types and climate scenarios (Illinois, Colorado, Arizona).

“For centuries, humans have used the benefits of the sun to produce food and energy — and only in recent decades has humanity turned to harvesting solar for renewable energy,” said Khanna, the ACES Distinguished Professor of Agricultural & Consumer Economics at Illinois. “But to produce solar energy at the utility scale is land intensive, and cropland is often the most suitable for this purpose.”