Katherine Atkins / Earth & Environmental Sciences / Faculty Mentor: Yike Shen
As general climate trends predict warmer weather, it is important to improve agricultural management strategies to reflect the needs of the land. With prior understanding of historical land use, precipitation, and temperature measurements, climate models can project agro-hydrological outcomes and allow users to develop sustainable plans of action. The Oklahoma and Central Plains Agricultural Research Center established eight Water Resource and Erosion (WRE) watersheds to comprehensively measure water quality and quantity data under agricultural stresses. Data was collected from 1977 to 1999 by the US Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service. This extensive dataset can improve modeling pertaining to land use management and allows for a thorough calibration of process-based models such as the Agricultural Policy/Environmental eXtender (APEX). This study aimed to create climate projections utilizing a calibrated APEXgraze model, a modified variant of the APEX model with an enhanced grazing module and additional grazing database, under different climate scenarios to assess grazing impacts on grassland and cropland WRE watersheds. Key tasks included collecting climate outputs from Global Circulation Models recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce scenarios and augmenting post-processing programs to establish a computational platform for future crop management research.
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