SW Climate Hub Fellow, Julian Reyes reports on a "big data" project focused on soil health and social-ecological feedbacks and the project members' visit to the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) in Annapolis, MD
During the first week of March, Southwest Hub Fellow Julian Reyes visited the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) in Annapolis, MD to collaborate on a "big data" project "Soil as a social-ecological feedback: Mapping the social and ecological processes for agroecosystem resilience in the era of climate change." A little about SESYNC first because it is a truly unique research center that promotes synthesis as a research method. SESYNC is funded by the National Science Foundation, the University of Maryland and others and is "charged with motivating and accelerating socio-environmental research balancing the needs of people and the environment". The center has advanced computational facilities for big data analyses, and they provide the support to interdisciplinary teams of natural and social scientists to solve complex socio-environmental problems using existing but underused data, knowledge, and expertise.
Principal investigators on the "Soil as a social-ecological feedback" project are Gabrielle Roesch-McNally (Northwest Climate Hub Fellow), Andrea Basche (Assistant Profesor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln), and Erich Seamon (Ph.D. Candidate at University of Idaho). Other Hub fellows are also part of the team include Rachel Schattmann (Northeast) and Nora Alvarez (Caribbean).
The project goal is to examine how soil health acts as a social-ecological feedback at the level of individual farmers', agencies' and policymakers’ decisions to use or encourage soil enhancing practices. The project team aims to accomplish this goal through a transdisciplinary integration of biophysical, climatic and social science data at multiple scales (spatial and human-institutional). They want to map the “where” and “why” of soil health practice adoption. Their guiding research question is: What are the most important social, economic, biophysical, climatic, and policy-level factors governing the relationship of soil health practices/principles, which ideally achieve the goal of resilient soils? Related, how can this soil adaptation feedback loop be leveraged to encourage greater stewardship amongst U.S. farmers, to preserve and enhance soil resources for climate resilience? Read more here: http://soilhealthfeedback.org/
Julian writes the following to describe their March meeting:
I'm a 'big data' enthusiast, and I was super-excited to be part of this project. For our March meeting we sought to focus on the nitty-gritty of our project. We discussed (1) data availability, access, and transformation, (2) structural equation modeling (SEM), and (3) Story Maps. Conservation practice data from the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) are hard to come by, but group members have been successful in obtaining dollars by county by practice for a few conservation programs such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Eventually, these data will be linked with Risk Management Agency (RMA) crop insurance payments and other socio-economic data. These data are important to conduct SEM, and address relationships important to soil health. While I won't bore you with how SEM is done, it has been a journey for the group (and myself!) to really understand how SEM works and what is needed to run SEM appropriately. Our final major discussion involved Story Maps, a visualization tool created by Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) to help tell stories using data and maps. We agreed that we will need multiple story maps depending on our audience (still, a good finding). Really, your project outreach products and science communication should be tailored to your audience and/or stakeholder!