Organic Agriculture: modelling nutrients and assessing land impact

In the short video here above, PhD student Anna Muntwyler gives a brief overview on the project (if teh video is not available in your region, please use this external page link).

Food production is among the human activities with the highest impacts on the environment. It is responsible for a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and three-quarters of the global ocean and freshwater eutrophication. Unfortunately, much of the nutrients mobilized by humans to maintain our food production end up in aquatic systems. To come up with effective solutions for this environmental problem, we need to be able to depict where our nutrients end up. However, we currently lack a spatially explicit P model. This PhD thesis aims at identifying the most sustainable agricultural practices considering their environmental impacts with a focus on their nutrient management (nitrogen and phosphorous). Life cycle inventory (LCI) of agricultural management will be enhanced by using a spatially explicit crop and ecosystem model (DayCent) with an improved P submodel together with an erosion model (RUSLE). Subsequent integration of the improved LCI with a mass-flow model capturing the global food system (SOLm) will help to analyse the effects, benefits and trade-offs of different nutrient management scenarios and production systems for providing adequate food for the global population. Assessing the environmental impacts of different agricultural management systems with improved nutrient cycle modelling will allow to identify environmental hotspots of impacts as well as regions, where a transition to organic production would be favourable from a life cycle perspective.

external page Link

Collaboration

This project belongs to the collaborative doctoral program between the external page Plant Science Center (ETH, University of Zürich and University of Basel) and the external page EC Joint Research Center (Ispra, IT).
It is carried out with the additional collaboration of the external page Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL).

• external page Panos Panagos, Researcher at the JRC Ispra, Italy (D3 - Land Resources)
• external page Emanuele Lugato, Researcher at the JRC Ispra, Italy (D3 - Land Resources)
• external page Adrian Müller, Researcher at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL