This position is part of a newly awarded USDA Sustainable Agricultural Systems project that aims to translate soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration science and farmer behavior into actionable strategies for increasing SOC storage in agricultural fields across the Midwestern Corn Belt (MWCB).
Reporting to Professor Thomas Hertel, in the Department of Agricultural Economics, the Post-Doctoral Research Associate will work within an interdisciplinary team to design tailored carbon incentives promoting CSAP adoption and to analyze the trade-offs and synergies of this adoption on food production and water quality, with a focus on land and water resources in agriculture.
The economic modeling undertaken by this individual will be spatially explicit and seeks to characterize economic and biophysical relationships at the level of individual grid cells, all nested within a global economic model. Current research in this group is focused on land cover change, water scarcity, nitrate leaching, food security, agricultural productivity, climate change, biodiversity and international trade.
The selected applicant will be responsible for gathering and reconciling gridded data for the MWCB region, building a new version of the SIMPLE-G model for this project (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-68054-0).
The successful applicant will validate the model and ensure that it communicates effectively with the other components of this project, also publishing papers. In addition, the post-doc will work with project leadership to implement and test a dashboard for communication of SIMPLE-G results to stakeholders.
