GABBs project Principal Investigator, Dr. Carol Song, and her research team participated in the 2018 Conference on Long Run Sustainability of US Agriculture on September 17, 2018. The conference, held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, was hosted by Purdue University’s Dr. Thomas Hertel.

Dr. Hertel, a Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics is the lead investigator of the project entitled From Global to Local to Global: Attaining Long Run Sustainability in US Agriculture, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation. The project goal is to “leverage existing knowledge, models and data to understand and communicate the interplay between global change and local sustainability of US agriculture in the context of alternative national, state and local policies affecting agricultural productivity and environmental quality. In particular, the team examines the tradeoffs between: 1) crop production, prices and food consumption, 2) nitrogen losses, and 3) groundwater depletion. Special attention will be paid to the role of current policies and institutions in governing these tradeoffs, as well as the impacts of prospective policies targeting land use, nitrogen applications and the allocation of groundwater.”

During the conference, Dr. Song presented an overview of the GABBs cyberinfrastructure and related resources and several domain scientists demonstrated the GABBs-enabled global sustainability modeling tool, SIMPLE-on-a-Grid (SIMPLE-G). SIMPLE-G is a global-gridded economic model used to examine how the global farm and food system is shaped by future agro-climatic conditions and socio-economic drivers, thereby, allowing users to make broad projections on future demands for food, water and land.  Dr. Hertel’s team of researchers used a version of the SIMPLE-G model that is focused on the U.S. to demonstrate how anyone may explore the modeling results and examine the tradeoffs of various land-water policy implications on MyGeoHub. Release 1 of SIMPLE-G US was released on MyGeoHub in September and is available publicly.

According to Dr. Song, “the SIMPLE-G US tool and MyGeoHub worked flawlessly at the conference. I was very proud of the team for the excellent support they provided. SIMPLE-G US is still a work-in-progress. The feedback from the 70 or so attendees was very valuable for us to continue to improve the tool and the underlying GABBs cyberinfrastructure. There is a lot of interest in sharing models, datasets and analyses and for the ease of use in training and broader engagement that MyGeoHub provides.”

To learn more about SIMPLE-G and other GABBs Project resources, visit: https://mygeohub.org/groups/gabbs/.