(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.

Rooftops are so 2020. If humanity’s going to stave off the worst of climate change, people will need to get creative about where they put solar panels. Now scientists are thinking about how to cover canals with them, reducing evaporation while generating power. Airports are filling up their open space with sun-eaters. And space doesn’t get much more open than on a farm: Why not stick a solar array in a field and plant crops underneath? It’s a new scientific (and literal) field known as agrivoltaics—agriculture plus photovoltaics—and it’s not as counterintuitive as it might seem....

Heavy precipitation that can damage crops is also on the rise, since a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. “In times

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.

Chang Cai, Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics

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?

“On the Evaluation of Heterogeneous Climate Change Impacts on US Agriculture: Does Group Membership Matter?" (published in Climatic Change)

I studied the impact of wildfires on recreation demand in western national parks. I'm particularly proud of it because I developed this idea from scratch based on my personal experience and observations, and this is what

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.

The intersection of a changing climate with aging dams and other water management infrastructure poses a unique challenge to society [29, 30]. The aim of this task is to assess where investment can be best geospatially prioritized to establish sustainable water management, addressing aging of existing infrastructure and opportunities from green infrastructure. 

2. Biodiversity and Food Security: Achieve transformative understanding of biodiversity dynamics under distant disasters, global changes, international trade, and land use.

The aim of this task is to improve our understanding of the connection between local land-use changes and global

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.

Objective 1: Coproduce research and advance market development along the agricultural value chain to identify and address social, economic, agronomic, and environmental barriers to the adoption of diverse sustainable agricultural systems.

Objective 2: Model economic and ecosystem (air, water) impacts of diverse landscape scenarios across the agricultural value chain to develop evidence-based policy recommendations, quantify sustainability metrics and establish conditions required for economic vitality.

Objective 3

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.”

While solar has become more profitable for land use, concerns have arisen that it could cut into food production. And some counties have now prohibited large-scale photovoltaic arrays from replacing agricultural land.

“Agrivoltaics — co-locating energy and food production —