Stewardship Science Technology for Monitoring the Socio-Ecological Outputs of Farming Activities

Stewardship Science Technology for Monitoring the Socio-Ecological Outputs of Farming Activities

Project Team

Zia Mehrabi, Research Associate (PI), Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability

Funding

Weston Foundation, UBC University Sustainability Initiative

 

About the Project

The Long Term Socio-Ecological Research Station at UBC Farm is spearheading an initiative to generate the decision-support technology that is needed for an environmentally sustainable and food secure future. The station is developing a functional prototype of a software management tool that allows for the monitoring of socio-ecological factors that matter to farming system choices – inputs (e.g. labour, fertilizers, water, energy, fertility), biodiversity (e.g. birds, pollinators, plant life, soil invertebrates), climate impacts (e.g. carbon stocks and fluxes), water pollution (e.g. leaching, run-off), profitability, nutrient supply (calories, micronutrients), and system resilience from both ecological (e.g. yield, pollinator populations) and social networks(e.g, consumer – producer transactions).

This project aims to develop intelligent technology that concurrently tracks the production and environmental outcomes of farm management in a scalable way, generating the information needed by farmers, governments, and consumers to undertake informed decision-making.

See LiteFarm for next phase of the project.

External Links and Publications

Zia Mehrabi Biography

Tanadini, M. & Mehrabi, Z. (2017). Does no-till agriculture limit crop yields? bioRxiv 179358. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/179358

Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Waha, K., Jarvis, L., Kremen, C., Herrero, M., Rieseberg, L.H. (2018). Trends in Global Agricultural Land Use: Implications for Environmental Health and Food Security. Annual Review Plant Biology. (29)69:789-815. doi: 10.1146/annurev-arplant-042817-040256.