By Jonathan Winter

Understanding evolving water resources, such as changing precipitation patterns, decreasing groundwater supplies, and growing water use, is a key component of determining climate impacts on agriculture. To create strategies for improving the representation of water supply and demand in assessments of the agricultural sector, the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) and USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) brought together over 35 leading scientists in climate, hydrology, water resources management, agronomy, and economics from more than 20 different institutions for a workshop last week at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. (more…)

AgMIP is launching a new initiative that brings together gridded crop modelers and data providers to provide a central organizing hub for a new generation of gridded crop modeling activities within AgMIP. The AgMIP GRIDded crop modeling (Ag-GRID) initiative leverages existing AgMIP strengths from the climate, crop modeling, IT, and economics teams, as well as RAPs, scaling, and uncertainty cross-cutting themes to develop new initiatives for improving quality and access to gridded data, models, computing, and scenario development. This effort seeks to coalesce the international community of large-scale gridded crop modelers around the most important topics at the interface of food and climate. (more…)

The Coordinated Climate-Crop Modeling Project (C3MP) is pleased to announce that we now have over 120 registered participants from 37 countries worldwide! This map shows the regions that are represented by participants, who are collectively using 10 crop models to investigate over 14 different crops, and counting. (more…)

The 2013 Climate–Smart Agriculture: Global Science Conference was held at the University of California, Davis March 20-22. The 2013 Conference focused on three main themes: farm and food systems, landscape and regional issues, and the integrative and transformative institutional and policy aspects that will bridge across scales to link science and practice to ensure food security, poverty alleviation and multiple ecosystem services.

AgMIP was presented during a special session at the conference, Putting science into practice, on Friday March 22 8:30–10:00 am. The AgMIP presentation highlighted results of many AgMIP initiatives, giving the attendees an overview of new methodologies and how they are leading to outputs that are leading to scientific advances as well as new assessments of climate change impacts and adaptation.

One of the attendees stated that he learned more in the AgMIP session than in any other session in the conference. This was a compliment given that many of the sessions were excellent.
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Release of working paper: Predicting agricultural impacts of large-scale drought: 2012 and the case for better modeling

The 2012 growing season saw one of the worst droughts in a generation in much of the United States and cast a harsh light on the need for better analytic tools and a comprehensive approach to predicting and preparing for the effects of extreme weather on agriculture.

In response to this need RDCEP and AgMIP researchers have released a working paper as an example of a simulation-based forecast for the 2012 US maize growing season produced as part of a high-resolution multi-scale predictive mechanistic modeling study designed for decision support, risk management, and counterfactual analysis.

You can download a pdf of the working paper at SSRN.

The Biological Systems Simulation Group (BSSG) Conference is holding its 42nd annual meeting at Penn State University on April 23-25, 2013. The meeting, jointly sponsored by AgMIP, will emphasize modeling crop responses to the interactive effects of carbon dioxide, temperature and water availability. The goal is to bring together modeling approaches and data from field (FACE) and growth chamber experiments to improve our understanding of the interaction of these factors in determining the growth and yield of crops. The meeting includes participatory workshops intermixed with presentations from invited speakers and posters.

See the event website for more information and registration.

The Earth Institute at Columbia University posted a story about Cynthia Rosenzweig’s presentation at AAAS in it’s blog, State of the Planet, this week. The story entitled “Making Sense of Climate’s Impact on Food Security” featured AgMIP’s efforts to improve the models that are being used to predict the impact of climate change on agriculture.

Read the full story here.

AgMIP is pleased to announce the launch of the Coordinated Climate-Crop Modeling Project (C3MP). C3MP aims to mobilize international crop modelers for a coordinated investigation of climate vulnerability and climate change impacts on agriculture.

We believe that C3MP is a tremendous opportunity to improve connections in the international crop modeling community and advance toward AgMIP model intercomparison and climate impact assessment goals.

To learn more and register your participation, please visit the C3MP page or contact Alex Ruane, Sonali McDermid and Cynthia Rosenzweig at c3mp@agmip.org.

AgMIP is holding the latest in a series of rapid development workshops, also known as sprints, February 4-8, 2013 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin, Texas. These sprints facilitate the swift development of applications and tools for use by the AgMIP research community. This sprint, referred to as the “Austin Hackathon”, is being sponsored by the iPlant Collaborative.

The iPlant Collaborative is funded by the National Science Foundation, with the goal of building cyberinfrastructure and computational tools to solve grand challenges in plant biology. Read more about the Hackathon on the iPlant website.

Overview: With partial support of DFID/UKaid, ICRISAT/CCAFS, and CIMMYT/CSISA, AgMIP is conducting a training course to enable researchers to utilize multiple crop models and AgMIP software tools to conduct Regional Integrated Assessments of crop production and food security. With a focus on experienced crop modelers who are advancing AgMIP Protocol-driven research in South Asia (SA) and Sub Saharan Africa (SSA), the training will expand modelers’ knowledge base to include DSSAT or APSIM methods. Additionally, the sessions will train a small number of experienced crop modelers as Trainers capable of providing instruction and/or guidance to other researchers in SA and SSA. (more…)

AgMIP's mission is to improve substantially the characterization of world food security as affected by climate variability and change, and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries.

AgMIP coordination is located at the Columbia University Earth Institute Center for Climate Systems Research, 2880 Broadway, New York, NY 10025 USA
phone +1.212.678.5563 | email info@agmip.org

AgMIP gratefully acknowledges major support from the UK Department for International Development's UKaid, in partnership with the US Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service.

AgMIP also acknowledges numerous sources of direct and in-kind support.