Tracking Change Across North America

Since World War II, agriculture has shifted from small and diverse farms to much larger intensified cropping and grazing systems. Yield benefits like bigger and more stable yields were significant and relatively immediate, but the consequences and vulnerabilities of industrialized agricultural systems have been slower to emerge. These vulnerabilities, in conjunction with climate change and land use change, may expose our agricultural systems to significant risk.

In 2022, four research networks began collaborating to explore overarching concerns regarding the resilience of North American agriculture. The Network for Integrated Agricultural Resilience Research (NIARR) uses extensive knowledge, data, and expertise of scientists from the USDA-ARS LTAR, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Canadian Agroecosystem Living Lab Network (CALL-Net), Canadian ResNet and the international Resilience Alliance.  They have recently embarked on four research projects that address different aspects of resilience in our valuable and vulnerable North American agricultural landscapes.

Regionalization North America builds on an LTAR project dividing the United States into regions using subsets of social-ecological variables relevant to agricultural production. They have created sets of maps using data and methods that are statistically defensible, ecologically and socially meaningful, and useful for answering agricultural research questions of interest. Regionalization North America will apply the same methodologies to North America.

Climate change is heightening uncertainties and challenges in agricultural production, so it is increasingly important to work across political borders to understand key aspects of agriculture from a broader spatial perspective—the Great Plains do not end at the Mexican or Canadian borders. This partnership will result in spatial regions that can be used for broad spatial analyses, will provide statistical grounds for determining how far and to which regions we can extrapolate analytical results, and will enhance cooperative learning across borders.

Shocks to agriculture from land use and climate change, land, soil, and water degradation, and globalization are increasing. At the same time, the North American model of industrialized agriculture is being exported globally. Some consequences of this model of agriculture are well understood, but the risk of large-scale regime shifts like the U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s are not. NIARR researchers seek to better understand the resilience of North American agriculture, and this project will provide foundational spatial maps that will allow us to ask a variety of resilience research questions at multiple spatial scales, including larger-than-normal scales.

"When developing the Regionalization workflow, it was important to us that the maps created were statistically valid, ecologically meaningful, reproducible, and useful for answering the agricultural sustainability questions LTAR was asking." – Dr. Sarah Goslee, USDA-ARS Pasture Systems and Watershed Management Research Unit, University Park, PA

Multiple sets of regionalizations at North American scales that capture regions as a function of climate and soil variables and production types, and the ability to extrapolate site-specific results to similar regions across North America.

"Regionalization North America is a very important project because it will allow us to better understand the area of inference for our research activities, or in other words, where in the continent the findings are applicable and relevant.  It will not only facilitate the extension of new knowledge, innovations, and solutions to similar regions, but also help us (researchers in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico) to identify important agricultural regions that are not well represented in our current research networks." – Jason Vanrobaeys, Agroecosystem Resilience Lead, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada 

Several frameworks exist to track resilience in agricultural social-ecological systems (SES), but they have notable gaps. In particular, this project aims to move away from single indicators that reflect a single scale and are from a single discipline. The focus will be on developing indicators that integrate social-ecological resilience, as opposed to social and ecological indicators, and that incorporate missing perspectives such as traditional knowledge and cross-scale impacts. 

It is difficult to determine the resilience of agriculture broadly or for a particular production system in a particular locale without data that reflects resilience attributes. Developing indicators that reflect resilience to a multiplicity of disturbance types, apply to multiple spatial and temporal scales, or reflect both social and biophysical attributes would complement ongoing efforts in both countries, but it is not clear what those indicators could or should be.

This project should provide a systematic understanding of what is missing from current resilience indicator frameworks and generate novel integrative indicators that either capture more than one system dimensions (e.g., human health and soil health), or operate across more than one scale.

Crop diversification is an important strategy for supporting the multi-functionality of agricultural systems, as it can improve pest management and buffer against disturbances like extreme weather events and market volatility.

A program called DRIVES (Diverse Rotations Improve Ecosystem Services) uses long-term experimental data from 21 sites across North America to ask fundamental questions about yield and yield stability, nutritive value, energy use, changes in soil organic carbon and price stability along a gradient of rotational complexity for each cash crop and at the rotation-level. NIARR is proposing a complementary project that will expand the analyses to include resilience questions centered on applying DRIVES findings at spatial scales larger than the field or farm, addressing barriers to implementing crop rotation diversity strategies, and situating DRIVES findings using resilience theory. 

Heterogeneity across all the dimensions of agricultural social-ecological systems is a core mechanism of resilience, and evidence supports crop rotation diversity as one important form of heterogeneity at the field scale. However, we don’t know as much about how crop rotation diversity affects agricultural processes at larger scales or, thus, how it can contribute to resilience within an agricultural sector or a particular geographic region. Understanding resilience at larger spatial scales is important for food security within and across production sectors or regions. 

Possible outcomes might include a gap analysis of experimental data related to our interests, a better understanding of how or whether plot and field data can be applied to larger spatial scales, and ways to connect with research projects focused on human dimensions in order to better understand the limits of farmer adaptive capacity to use crop rotation diversification strategies.

Shocks to agricultural systems appear to be increasing as a result of climate change, land use change, globalization and other factors. This project aims to ask a series of research questions about adaptive capacity and vulnerability to regime shifts in agriculture systems at several scales to find patterns of shock and response. We will use a social-ecological systems (SES) approach so that we can account for the reality of agricultural SES as complex and multi-scaled systems with interacting components from both the social and biophysical dimensions.

Most research on adaptive capacity has focused on the farm and farmer scale. This project will focus on agricultural production sectors and regions at the national and North American scale. Similar to the Regionalization North America project, we want to work collaboratively across borders both to enhance our learning, and to ask fundamental questions about the future security of agricultural production on this continent.

It is important to understand the limits to adaptive capacity at different scales in our agricultural systems because unexpected regime shifts can be so consequential. Many systems have already undergone undesirable change. In that case, management efforts might focus on deliberately transforming the system back to a more desirable regime or into a novel and desirable new regime. Consider the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when feedbacks between a prolonged drought and over-zealous tilling of grasslands drove a widespread collapse in the social and biophysical parts of the system. It took substantial resources and decades to reverse the collapse, but former Dustbowl lands are now some of the most productive in the United States. What current regions, agricultural sectors or production systems are potentially at risk of a regime shift? We have a poor understanding of the vulnerability of the agricultural systems we rely on. 

Identify the variables associated with resilience and adaptive capacity at different scales (within sector, across sector and across different geographic extents). Identify patterns of change across production systems to better understand the components of a desirable and resilient agricultural system at multiple scales. 

NIARR is working to advance the science of resilience in North American agricultural landscapes by working collaboratively across borders and across organizations to ask research questions of high value to the agriculture community. NIARR is a crucial hub for conducting long-term, multi-scale research focused on resilient agricultural social-ecological systems. The research outcomes will inform policy and management practices, and create pathways to improve our understanding of, and to monitor, landscapes that are crucial for food security and human well-being. 

Canadian Agroecosystem Living Labs Network (CALL-Net) The Canadian Agroecosystem Living Labs Network is a national network of agricultural innovation sites focused on supporting the Agricultural Climate Solutions — Living Labs program, which brings together farmers, scientists and other sector stakeholders to codevelop and test innovative technologies and on-farm practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon in real-world conditions.  Learn More 

LTAR The USDA-ARS Long-Term Agroecosystem Research Network focuses on sustainable intensification and profitability of agroecosystems.  Learn More

Resilience Alliance The Resilience Alliance is an international resilience network which has been the core developer of resilience theory and its application to real socio-ecological systems. Learn More

ResNet ResNet is focused on broad questions of resilience, scale and ecosystem services in multiple working landscapes of Canada. Learn More

This project is funded by a  National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network  grant from the  Dynamics of Integrated Socio-Environmental Systems (DISES)  directorate, and a University of Nebraska Collaboration Initiative Seed Grant.