SAFES integrates agriculturally and environmentally related disciplines to develop holistic approaches for tackling "wicked" challenges.
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Programmatic Domains
Achieving agricultural, food, economic, and ecosystem sustainability amid changing political, economic, and environmental climates is inherently a multi-system problem that can be a moving target. The science of agricultural sustainability for landscape-level challenges will require a multi-disciplinary and multi-scale approach involving innovations in integrated modeling, data science, and visualization.
SAFES establishes an infrastructure of four programmatic domains to address key challenges that impact society within the interconnected contexts of agriculture, food, watersheds, natural resources, the economy, and urban/rural interfaces. These domains of expertise are the scaffold that support the establishment and endurance of areas of expertise, fortifying the University's capacity to effectively respond and provide solutions to emergent issues such as disruption, resilience, regeneration, biodiversity, optimizing ecosystems services, and innovative stakeholder engagement, among others.
Data
The data domain will create a capacity of expertise in the theory and methods of data acquisition and analysis. This domain will identify data sources that should be available to researchers at Penn State and work to make these resources easily accessible to the Penn State research community. The data domain will also identify and develop state of the art techniques to collect original data (sensor technology) and mine data (machine learning or artificial intelligence) for important new insights relevant to multisystem dynamics and landscape scale interactions.
Models
The models domain will create a capacity of expertise in coupling and translating information across biophysical and socioeconomic models. This framework builds on strengths at Penn State in the development and use of computational models and tools for research and expands this expertise to integrate across models and collaborate across modeling teams and platforms. The model domain will focus on building data and computational tools to help facilitate coupling and translation across individual models.
Discovery
The discovery domain will create a capacity of expertise in making acquired data and interoperable models accessible to academic and non-academic audiences within and beyond the university. This domain builds strength in specialized translations (visual, technical, verbal, etc.) that can effectively communicate the knowledge and thus extend the societal benefits of the research, evaluation of new technologies, and design of communications around policy options and business management solutions. The discovery domain builds on a strong and unique tradition in the college for “use- and need-inspired" research. The discovery domain will be a “switchboard" for connecting researchers to resources and building synergies across the University to leverage talent and skill within and especially beyond the college.
Landscape-Level Interactions
The landscape-scale interactions domain will build a capacity of expertise in understanding how interactions occur across scales, which is critical to improving our predictability of how a system at one spatial scale will be influenced by an impact occurring at a different spatial scale. This framework may be understood as a cross-cutting research domain that will address fundamental challenges most modelers and data scientists face when attempting to understand multisystem dynamics; namely, how are the different components in the system integrated, and importantly how do these dynamics interact across different landscape scales.
SAFES Critical Issue Initiatives
Advancing knowledge and practice on economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable agricultural systems in urbanized landscapes.
Developing sustainable bioeconomy solutions to generate carbon negative biochemicals, biomaterials, bioenergy, and food products.
Understanding the complex nature and consequences of water contaminants and providing critical data to empower effective and time-critical solutions.
Addressing interconnected problems surrounding food choice, food waste, human health, and the environmental impacts of these systems.
Translating Critical Zone research into actionable management practices.
Working to understand the complex factors underpinning biodiversity declines and creating tools to improve biodiversity outcomes.
Working to understand and improve collaborative governance effectiveness, outcomes, and impacts in order to create more equitable and sustainable systems to manage natural resources.
Harnessing the potential for agricultural technology and systems design to ensure resilience at the landscape-level.
Working to build a next-generation, integrated suite of models and analytic tools to understand the interdependent stressors, impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities of global and regional change.
Transforming the impact and effectiveness of responses to “hot spots” and “hot moments” of water contamination.
Affiliated Centers
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.
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.
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.
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.
Affiliated Initiatives and Projects
Projects underway as a rapid response to the coronavirus pandemic and its impacts on the interconnected systems of agriculture, food, and the environment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
