Thursday, May 25, 2017

New paper: using high resolution satellites to map agricultural practices in Kenya

My latest paper (Ayana et al. 2017) describes a method we used to map drainage ditches and furrows (a few examples shown above) on farms in Kenya (specifically the Sasumua region of the Upper Tana, Northwest of Nairobi) using high-resolution satellite imagery, and has a rough analysis showing that these features could be reducing sediment export in the study area by about 80%. The technical aspect which is the core of the paper will not be of interest to many people reading this. But the key point is that it's important to have this information to build a reasonable water quality model of the area, and this method makes acquiring that information possible (it would be too expensive to map via field work alone). You can download it from

Friday, May 19, 2017

Talk and interview at the DC March for Science

At the DC March for Science I was fortunate enough to give the first talk of the day (on Danny Karp's research on wildlife habitat and food safety), and to talk with The Weather Channel about The Nature Conservancy's work on soil.

Here's the interview from The Weather Channel:

And here's a video of my talk (the lighting wasn't great, apologies for that); note that if you go to you can download my slides and copy / paste text to ask companies to discourage their growers from clearing habitat:

Tips on lowering your carbon footprint

11 Quick and Relatively Painless Ways to Lower Your Carbon Footprint

Udvar-Hazy center

Monday, May 1, 2017

May journal article summary

Dry lake

For my second public-facing journal roundup, I'm leading with this nice photo of a dried out lake because if you only have time to read one of these articles, it should be Brian Richter's excellent overview of how to address water scarcity driven by irrigated agriculture. As I'm always harping about, irrigation efficiency can actually increase water consumption and worsen scarcity, and this paper has some solutions.

Skip to the end for the obligatory "one of these things is not like the other" paper on olfactory perception so you know what's going on when you're sniffing all those spring flowers.

Richter et al 2017 is a fantastic new overview (led by TNC's Brian Richter) of how to address water scarcity driven by irrigated ag (which accounts for 90% of water consumption globally). If you've been on this list for a while you've heard me harp about how making irrigation more efficient can actually lead to more water being consumed, and this paper tackles that very thorny issue (if you haven't heard about it yet, just read this paper as it covers it quite well). There are three key components to making this work: proper water budgeting, actual changes in crop water use (via one of several strategies), and being able to transfer water savings to other users or the environment (as opposed to just shifting to more water-intensive crops or expanding irrigated cropland). One key strategy they find as  reliable to reduce scarcity is changes in cropping (e.g. shift from rice to other grains, or temporary fallowing). On the policy side, critical ingredients for success are a formal water rights system (based on consumptive use rather than withdrawal volumes) that allows for trading / selling water rights, as well as capping total consumptive water use. The second page of the paper has a great story about how ag in Arizona is repeating the mistakes of indigenous people in the area who disappeared ~1450 AD when drought caused their irrigated ag to collapse. You can also see slides related to this work here:

Scott et al 2014 is another paper looking at the challenges of trying to reduce water scarcity / depletion via irrigation efficiency. In addition to the well described case of efficiency inreasing total water consumption, they also describe a "scale paradox" (where water impacts are displaced in space and time), and a "sectoral paradox" (where water "saved" in agriculture is used by other sectors like urban or industrial).

Bekchanov et al 2016 is a case study of what increasing irrigation efficiency could look like in the Aral Sea basin (Central Asia). They find that it could lead to considerable economic benefits through boosting crop yields plus allowing cropland expansion and a shift to more water-intensive crops. While only 3-4% of irrigation comes from groundwater (so depletion is less of a concern), this finding still raises questions for resilience: having crops that use more water means more risk when water is scarce. To me this is a useful paper in showing the need for policy to accompany irrigation changes to reduce those risks.

Dalin et al 2017 explores the degree to which irrigation is driving the depletion of groundwater in different countries around the world, and how that depletion relates to agricultural trade. It's worth looking at Table 1 and Figures 2 and 3 which reveal interesting patterns. For example, the 42% of water depletion in the US is for exports, while in China only 1% is. One way in which this could be useful is in finding partners in advocating for better agricultural water use and accompanying policies (e.g. in addition to working with Mexico on their depletion, also pressuring US buyers of their products to advocate for reducing water depletion).

Carlson et al 2016 is a nice summary of GHGs and emissions for row crops; they found 1.994 Gt CO2e / yr (although with a standard deviation of 2.172 Gt), and note that other studies range from 2.294-3.102 Gt CO2e / yr. They find that the major sources of crop emissions are methane from rice (48%), peatland drainage (32%), and nitrogen fertilizer application (20%). You can get the paper and supplementary info here:
The full spatial dataset is available here under “Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Croplands”:

I'm getting a lot of questions about the suitability of cover crops for climate mitigation / carbon sequestration lately, and Poeplau and Don 2015 is currently my favorite reference on the topic. They find that on average cover crops sequester 0.32 t C / ha /yr (=1.17 t CO2e/ha/yr), and did not find significant impacts on this from tillage, climate, or cover crop type (which is surprising).Two key notes on how to use and interpret this figure. First is that this figure is about 50% higher than a few other studies (although it's also more rigorous than them). More importantly is that this figure does NOT account for changes in nitrous oxide; so for example if adding a leguminous cover crop without reducing fertilizer, it is likely that nitrous oxide emissions would be increased (and could offset the soil carbon gains). On the other hand, in a precision ag context with regular soil testing, a nitrogen-fixing cover crop could reduce fertilizer inputs which would boost the GHG benefits. As always, the choice of cover crop and how it affects other management is key.

He et al 2016 is yet another paper challenging what we think we know about soil carbon. The authors used radiocarbon dating to find that soil carbon was often much older than most models assume them to be (thousands of years rather than hundreds). This matters because it indicates that soil carbon is likely turning over slower, and thus that soils will be slower to change in response to management practices (reducing its efficacy for climate mitigation).

I'm only including Esteves 2016 in my review to show the dangers of assuming that a published journal article can be trusted as is. Figure 6 shows that the authors consider Brazilian soy fields to act as fairly strong GHG sinks if you exclude land cover change. The way they arrive at this unusual conclusion is by treating corn grown in between no-till soy crops as a "byproduct," and then assigning credit for presumed land conversion avoided. A more appropriate approach would have been to simple show that by producing more crop on a given parcel of land, the emissions per unit of crop produced was lower. Beware of results that look too good to be true!

Miguez and Bollero 2005 is a small (36 study) meta-analysis of how winter cover crops affect corn yields. Some key findings: grass cover crops did NOT affect corn yields, legume cover crops boosted yields as long as N fertilizer is <200 kg N / ha (with bigger yield gains as N fertilizer is lower, e.g. 17% boost from 100-199 kg N / ha, vs. 34% boost for <99 kg N / ha), and biculture cover crops (a mix of grass and legume crops) boosted yields especially at higher fertilization rates (presumably to compensate for the nutrients used by the cover crop). Note that some other studies have shown more mixed results for the impact of cover crops on yields, but this provides some good clues about which contexts they work well in. This study didn't look at "tillage radish" or daikon, since that was pretty uncommon a decade ago.

This is a blog rather than a paper, but it's a thought-provoking read. Essentially, the author (Claire Kremen) argues that trying to intensify agriculture to meet expected demands for food is the wrong approach. She advocates instead for a focus on reducing demand (by reducing the amount of meat produceed and consumed, better family planning to slow population growth, and sharply reducing food waste), and also advocates for the resilience benefits of more diverse agriculture. I personally have a hard time envisioning a world where we won't need to intensify agriculture to some degree, but I also think Kremen makes a compelling case for the need to also work on the demand side (which TNC currently does very little on). It's a complicated issue but a great conversation for conservationists to be having now. You can read the blog at

Booker et al 2013 argues that arid rangelands have limited potential for carbon sequestration, and that since most rangelands in the U.S. are arid (if they were wetter and more productive they would likely have been converted to cropland) that we should focus on preventing conversion of rangelands to other land uses (and avoiding soil erosion) rather than trying to significantly increase soil C sequestration through changes in management. One key point is that most C flux in arid rangelands is outside of the control of management, driven by weather / climate and soil type. Unlike more mesic (wetter) systems, arid rangelands typically do not have one "climax" vegetation community that can serve as a management goal; rather, they tend to have multiple possible states, with transitions among states controlled by weather patterns and soil features in addition to potentially being influenced by management. They recommend that work on shifting grazing management to improve C should be focused on more mesic / wetter rangelands that allow a wider range of management options and should respond more strongly to changes in management. There is a nice overview of specific topics related to C on rangelands including grazing management, woody shrubs, reforestation / afforestation, soil erosion, restoration, and fire. They conclude with a discussion of potential carbon policies and recommend that they a) not require short-term accounting, b) don't assume management is the primary driver of C storage, c) that they not allow sequestration to offset emissions without proof of additionality, and d) focus on conserving rangelands and restoring degraded cropland back to range.

Liang et al 2016 is an attempt to estimate grassland above ground biomass using remote sensing, which highlights the challenges of doing so. They found that using a single proxy for biomass didn't work well; the best one (NDVI) only explained 46% of the variation in biomass. A model relying on several variables performs better, but even including data collected on the ground including grass cover and height it only gets to 70% of the variance (63% if the ground data is only used to train the remote sensing instead of being used directly). Some TNC colleagues and I recently ran into similar challenges when trying to do something similar in Peru (and others have hit the same issues in the US); grassland remote sensing is hard!

Remember The Nature Conservancy's 2015 goal? Dinerstein et al 2017 presents an ambitious vision for nature that goes far beyond that with a catchy slogan ("nature needs half" meaning 50% of terrestrial ecoregions should be protected,, along with an assessment of progress towards that vision, and a revised set of  terrestrial ecoregions (available from They don't get into the issue of how to manage protected areas effectively to meet conservation goals, and only briefly touch on the issue of conflicts with human needs (including indigenous communities). But one way or another, this paper is sure to prompt a lot of good discussion about conservation goals, and it's worth reading accordingly.

Spring flowers have me thinking about odors, so I was fascinated by the Keller et al 2017 paper which evaluated how different people perceive and describe 476 different molecules, and built a model to predict how a molecule would be perceived. The model did pretty well at predicting how pleasant and intense a given odor would be, but only got <50% of the descriptors right (unsurprisingly "fish" and "flower" were easy, but less narrowly defined odors like "warn" or "wood" or "musky" were harder). Honestly I find the paper to be pretty unclear, but the topic was so interesting I still enjoyed reading it, especially once I gave up on trying to decipher most of the diagrams.

For science,


p.s. what do scientists like me do for earth day? Make a soil cake, of course!


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Richter BD, Brown JD, DiBenedetto R, Gorsky A, Keenan E, Madray C, et al. Water Policy Opportunities for Saving and Reallocating Agricultural Water to Alleviate Water Scarcity. Water Policy. 2017;19. Available:

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