The Penn State Agriculture and Environment Center (AEC) is focused on solving today’s water quality challenges related to the impacts of land use and land management.
This project investigates the factors controlling the chemical nature, spatial distribution and accumulation rates of SOC in a coastal wetland ecosystem within the Lake Erie basin by measuring above ground carbon stocks, soil organic carbon content, sources of organic carbon, and age and accumulation rate of carbon.
CNS has taken a complex, multidisciplinary approach to problem solving, developing an innovative, diverse and highly collaborative research team of soil scientists, agronomists, animal scientists, agricultural engineers, watershed managers, resource economists, policy specialists, landscape architects, geospatial analysts, hydrologists, aquatic ecologists, modelers, information technology experts, and community outreach specialists.
The Center for Pollinator Research is committed to developing and implementing integrative, multidisciplinary approaches to improving pollinator health, conservation, and management for ecosystems services through research, education, outreach and policy.
The model Cycles simulates agricultural productivity (grain, forage and biomass yield) and the water, carbon and nitrogen balance of soil-crop systems subject to different climate, soil and management constraints.
The Lower Susquehanna Initiative seeks to increase and integrate Penn State’s education, research, and extension capacity with partners in southcentral Pennsylvania, with an initial focus on Dauphin, Lancaster, and Lebanon Counties.
PCHES seeks to create a new, state-of-the-art, integrated modeling framework to drive advances in the quantitative understanding of energy, water, and land systems.
This comprehensive, multi-institutional project is an interdisciplinary framework developed to conduct practical research into sustainable agriculture practices that will mitigate environmental degradation in the Chesapeake Bay watershed while providing economic feasibility to farmers and farming communities for the long-term.
Water Insights is an interdisciplinary seminar series on water science, water management, and water policy sponsored by the Institute for Sustainable Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science (SAFES). Speakers include researchers, water managers, and water policy makers from Penn State, other universities, government agencies and non-governmental organizations.
Community-led stakeholder engagement holds considerable potential for effectively addressing natural resources challenges and building the long-term capacity and relationships needed for sustainable management and problem-solving. Undertaking stakeholder engagement initiatives requires purposeful design, implementation, strategies, and assessment if they are to be successful. With support from USDA-NIFA, the Water for Agriculture project embarked on a five-year integrated, multidisciplinary, engagement and research project to enhance the empirical and conceptual basis for understanding when, how, and under what conditions engagement initiatives are most likely to be successful. This guidebook is designed to provide you with a summary of the concepts, considerations, and tools you will need to approach your collaborative natural resource management in new and productive ways.
