My research focuses on the decades-long collective action problem of agricultural nonpoint source pollution. I am particularly interested in the role of collective action in agricultural landscapes, especially how farmers, government, and society cooperate to navigate tradeoffs between agricultural production and conservation.
Current Research Projects
Team: Landon Yoder (PI), Todd Royer (Co-PI), Adam S. Ward (Co-PI), Courtney Hammond-Wagner (Senior Personnel), Ben Wicker (Senior Personnel), Lisa Holscher (Senior Personnel), Hans Schmitz (Senior Personnel).
Funded by the USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program, North Central Region.
Both farmers and the public would benefit from improving nitrate retention, through lower fertilizer expenses and safer water for drinking and recreation respectively. However, while farmers have cut soil erosion rates in half over the past 40 years, nitrate loss from fertilizers remains a challenging problem. Among the complexities in retaining nitrate for crop production are: (1) the lack of nitrate loss data available to farmers at the farm scale for management decisions; and (2) the difficulty in connecting farm management to downstream outcomes, since most monitoring is done at a watershed scale and permits substantial ambiguity in how much any one farm might be losing. This project involves farmers in the process of collecting water samples to provide management-relevant data at the farm scale to assist farmers in evaluating their nutrient management.
Team: Landon Yoder (PI), Mallory Barnes (Co-PI), Adam S. Ward (Co-PI).
Funded by the Indiana Water Resources Research Center through the U.S. Geological Survey.
Water quality impairment remains a persistent and complex problem throughout the United States. However, one promising development has been the increase in cover crop adoption nationally and within Indiana. However, we know very little about whether cover crop adoption is occurring where it will be most effective to improve water quality. Existing data on cover crop adoption are primarily available at the county level, which does not provide spatially relevant information to inform environmental outcomes at watershed scales. Remote sensing can help to address this gap by providing large-scale, longitudinal data on where cover crops are located. To date, remote sensing has been used infrequently to assess watershed-scale implementation of conservation practices, focusing instead on improving vegetation indices. While cover crop adoption continues to increase, adoption research has shown that farmers face a range of barriers that may lead to variable use or discontinued adoption. This variability means that watershed-scale analysis is needed to understand the large-scale and long-term effects that cover crops have had on water quality and what this portends for future adoption trends. This project combines remote sensing, hydrological modeling, and spatial and temporal statistical analysis to examine statewide trends on the extent and location of cover crops and their effect on water quality outcomes.
Team: Landon Yoder (PI), Adam S. Ward (Co-PI), Todd Royer (Co-PI), and Rebecca Lave (Co-PI)
Funded by the Environmental Resilience Institute, as part of Indiana University’s Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge initiative.
Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars, nutrient pollution from agriculture remains persistent and widespread. Nutrient pollution is challenging to solve for multiple reasons, including that the consequences occur far from many dispersed sources and emerge over multiple years. These distal and delayed outcomes provide little information to farmers on the consequences of their management practices.
These dynamics contrast the trends in soil conservation, where erosion rates have been cut in half over the past 30 years through largely voluntary efforts where protecting topsoil has become the norm. This project aims to see how farm-scale monitor data informs both farmers’ understanding and expectations of nutrient losses and whether farmers act on the information in making management decisions.
Monitoring data on nutrient losses may provide valuable information to help farmers improve the nutrient use efficiency of their fertilizer management and function as an eco-social feedback between environmental outcomes and people’s environmental behavior.
Team: Adam S. Ward (PI), Kajsa Dalrymple (co-PI), Scott Spak (co-PI), and Landon Yoder (senior personnel).
Funded by the National Science Foundation – Water Sustainability and Climate.
The overall focus of this research is to project future scenarios for the agricultural Midwest given changes in climate, land management, and local governance. Within this broader focus, the role of local governments is an important but under-examined area of collaborative governance in watershed management. Collaborative governance has been promoted for decades as an effective way to address complex water resource problems. Watershed-based efforts face challenges that may undermine motivations to participate, such as biophysical asymmetries between upstream and downstream water users, while successful environmental management collaborations often depend on interdependent consequences to encourage participation. Similarly, political conflicts and turf wars can constrain the legal authorities given to special-purpose watershed organizations. The project looks at why local governments have voluntarily formed intergovernmental organizations, called watershed management authorities, to jointly undertake watershed planning and management in the agricultural Midwest and whether they exercise their existing legal authority to undertake projects or change policies.
Team: Shahzeen Attari (PI), Nathan Geiger (Co-PI), Landon Yoder (Co-PI), and Joe Kantenbacher (senior personnel)
Funded by the Environmental Resilience Institute, as part of Indiana University’s Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge initiative.
Description from Attari Lab Website (https://www.szattari.com/projects): Human behavior is responsible for the relentless rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from fossil fuel combustion, and the planet is on course for drastic climate change impacts in the decades to come. The impacts of climate change feel geographically and temporally distant and addressing climate change feels expensive and painful. One potentially useful but underdeveloped pathway for motivating public support of climate policies involves identifying, testing, and deploying powerful narratives that effectively present the drastic system-wide changes we need to stabilize carbon dioxide concentration and provide people pathways of achieving these goals. In this project we aim to investigate the narratives that Hoosiers use to imagine what a sustainable future could be in 50 or 100 years from now. Participants will identify pathways to achieve their sustainable futures that are self-generated rather than externally applied. These self-generated futures and pathways provide people emotional and cognitive scaffolding that allow people to compress time, bringing participants closer the distant future. A better understanding of how people imagine the future will inform the development of new narratives and stories that can inspire us to create a more sustainable state and nation. Stories allow us to fuse facts and feelings in a way that is powerful and complex. We aim to test how these self-generated stories can transform public support for decarbonization of our state.