Through funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) will ramp up efforts to investigate the impact of conservation practices on nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The Act, signed into law in 2022, includes a historic investment for implementation of practices that support climate mitigation through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), in addition to funding to advance estimates of mitigation outcomes.

The Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit of the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is a key collaborator on the work to advance mitigation outcome estimates. The funding will support the ongoing work of ARS plant physiologist and also an adjunct professor at UIUC, Carl Bernacchi and fellow ASC scientists Wendy Yang, Kaiyu Guan, and DoKyoung Lee to advance the understanding of conservation practices on GHG fluxes. Data will be used by modelers to improve mitigation outcome estimates, including estimates for USDA conservation programs and the US national inventory of GHG emissions and sinks.

“The Inflation Reduction Act provides funding for NRCS to address unmet demand for our conservation programs, and also funding to improve our mitigation outcome estimates and advance national reporting,” said Gayle Barry, the IRA National Coordinator for the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. “The work of ARS and partners like the University of Illinois are advancing critical research on the impact of conservation practices on GHG emissions, and we are excited to work together.”

The USDA funding for this project is through fiscal year 2031 and builds on the type of work University of Illinois faculty, the ASC, and Illinois’ Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment is doing through the SMARTFARM Project, supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Through the ARS, Bernacchi plans to sign research agreements with ASC scientists or hire researchers within the local ARS to work jointly with those scientists.

“Because of the team that we’ve put together with SMARTFARM, we are ideally situated to expand upon what we have been doing in order to meet the objectives of the section of the IRA funding this work,” Bernacchi said. “Because of the extent of our understanding of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture as well as modeling, the remote sensing, the infield measurements, and the biogeochemical process modeling and measurements we do, USDA recognized that we are well suited to create an intensive measurement site here.”

The SMARTFARM program at ARPA-E is directed by Steven Singer. “The Illinois intensive measurement site is a great example of partnership between ARPA-E and USDA.” Singer said. “The multi-year funding from the USDA NRCS as part of the IRA will allow the ASC group to expand the observations from the initial datasets generated in the ARPA-E SMARTFARM program. These data will provide a comprehensive inventory of greenhouse gas emissions from working farms, influencing models and informing policy.”

Opportunities for expanding collaboration with the Illinois research in nitrous oxide emissions were explored in January, when ASC convened a group of international leaders in soil nitrous oxide research, including some from the USDA and ARPA-E, in Chicago — which ultimately led to the announcement of the N2Onet to track emissions from agricultural systems.

“Allowing the USDA to see the vision that the University of Illinois faculty has in characterizing and quantifying the fluxes of N2O in agricultural settings really helped us move to the forefront of this funding opportunity,” Yang noted. “We will use our years of experience in this area to generate an unprecedented long-term record of multi-scale data needed to take the leap forward in our understanding of how to mitigate soil nitrous oxide emissions.”

As one of two intensive measurement sites in the Midwest (the other in Ames, Iowa), ARS Urbana will be a test bed of making baseline measurements at multiple different scales and then integrating those scales to understand the drivers and the consequences of management practices in current agricultural systems. Ultimately, the team will investigate how various changes in management or land uses can offset some of those greenhouse gas emissions. The funding will enable the collaborators to hire more researchers to further characterize what is happening with soil biogeochemistry, to understand the mechanisms behind greenhouse gas emissions from the soil, to purchase equipment to double or triple activities, and provide data necessary for improving model estimates of the impact of practices on mitigation outcomes.

Another stream of USDA funding will support a similar project by faculty in the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Sciences to instrument greenhouse gasses measurements from the Illinois Public Media Tower near Monticello. That project will use regional inverse modeling to study how different urban and agricultural settings are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, coupling precise measurements of those emissions with weather and climate circulation models.

Bernacchi believes that having resources and the infrastructure to develop data collection, data analysis, and data storage pipelines will leverage future funding opportunities.

“We’re a big gear in an important and impressive machine,” he concludes. “Our intensive measurement site is a strong blend of university and federal scientists. The granularity of what we are going to be measuring at the field scale in terms of really high temporal and spatial resolution all the way to the ecosystem and regional scale will bring us national attention in this effort.”

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About Agroecosystem Sustainability Center at the University of Illinois: The Agroecosystem Sustainability Center was founded in 2021 to lead global efforts in harmonizing sustainable food production with thriving ecosystems. The Center strives to revolutionize agricultural systems through research, collaboration, and engagement, bridging science and practice for agricultural productivity and ecosystem sustainability. Centered in the heart of Midwest on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the umbrella of both the College of Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences (ACES) and the Institute of Sustainability, Energy, and the Environment (iSEE), ASC is positioned at the critical intersection of academia, industry, policy, and on-the-ground practice. ASC is creating a diverse and dynamic hub for driving change and is committed to transforming its research into practical and scalable solutions, fortifying our ecosystems, bolstering farm profitability, and empowering agricultural systems to proactively mitigate and adapt to the realities of climate change.