Adaptively Managing Agricultural Production for Future Climate and Land Use Changes in Montana's Flathead River Basin


projects.cares.missouri.edu/agclim-montana

Project Goals

Agricultural producers, service providers (e.g., custom fertilizer and pesticide applicators), and other agricultural interests in Montanaâ's Flathead River Basin (FRB) lack the knowledge, information, and tools needed to capitalize on the benefits and minimize the adverse impacts of future climate and/or land use changes on agricultural production and associated natural resources. The first goal of the proposed project is to develop an adaptive agricultural management model that identifies best agricultural systems for adapting to climate and land use changes in the Flathead River Basin within Flathead County, Montana. The second goal is to enhance the capacity of agricultural producers to adaptively manage their operations for climate-land use changes by making the model and associated datasets useable and accessible via an interactive website.

Study Area

The study area is Flathead County in Montana's Flathead River Basin (FRB).

Project Objectives

  • To construct plausible future climate-land use change scenarios in terms of agriculturally-sensitive climate variables (i.e., precipitation, temperature, and CO2 concentrations), and agricultural land availability.
  • To develop an Adaptive AGricultural ManaGEment Model (AG-GEM) that determines the best agricultural systems for representative farms in the county under different plausible climate-land use change scenarios.
  • To create an interactive spatial decision support tool (ISDST) that makes AG-GEM and associated geospatial databases useable and accessible to agricultural producers.

Project Team

Tony Prato (principal investigator), agricultural economist, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
Zeyuan Qiu, agricultural economist, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ
Dan Fagre, ecologist and global change research coordinator, USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, West Glacier, MT
Duane Johnson, Superintendent and agronomist, Northwestern Agricultural Research Center, Montana State University, Kalispell, MT

Cooperators

Montana Farmers Union
Natural Resources Conservation Service

Project Duration

Three years (July 1, 2006-June 30, 2009)
Note: The project will utilize simulated landscape changes for Flathead County determined in an on-going study entitled Ecological Economic Consequences of Landscape Change in Montana's Flathead County.

130 Mumford Hall, Columbia, MO 65211
Tel: 573.882.7458 | Fax: 573.884.2199
Division of Applied Social Sciences
College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources

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