Crops in a Changing World: Hidden Forest-Agriculture Teleconnections

LAURA LOPEZ-HOFFMAN; AARON LIEN; JOSE SOTO; XIAO FENG; TRANG DANG; TA-KEN HUANG; ABIGAIL SWANN; DANIEL FERGUSON; DAVID BRESHEARS; ELIZABETH BALDWIN; NUNEZ REGUEIRO MAURICIO MANUEL; DANIEL PARK; ROBERT MERIDETH; BRIAN ENQUIST; KACEY ERNST

Jyväskylä

Congreso; 5th European Congress of Conservation Biology; 2018

International Society for Conservation Biology

Advances in climate change modeling have uncovered eco-climateteleconnections where changes in weather or the environment in one locationaffect distant regions. Recent studies demonstrate that loss of forest cover inone region (sending regions or locations) can alter temperature, precipitationand gross primary production (GPP) in far regions (receiving regions orlocations). Here we show how these eco-climate teleconnections in turn, bringchanges to agricultural yields and revenue in distant locations. In effect,forests provide telecoupled ecosystem services that sustain food productionin receiving locations. However, these telecouplings are seldom acknowledgedand remain unquantified. Thus, there is a critical need for research to quantifyhow forest loss in one location may further impact agricultural production inother areas. We conducted Community Earth System Model (CESM) modelexperiments in which we simulate forest die-off in different NEON regions inthe United States. We modeled multiple scenarios of forest loss in sendingregions to project a range of hypothesized climate impacts in receivingagricultural regions. Furthermore, we quantified the teleconnection bytransforming changes of climate into changes in agricultural production andmonetarizing the change of agricultural production in different NEON regions.Through a network analysis, we were able to differentiate NEON regions thathave a predominantly role of sending (e.g., Pacific Southwest) from those thatwere primarily receiving telecoupled ecosystem services (e.g., Southeast). Ourstudy contributes to the growing body of literature documenting telecoupledsystems and provides novel information that will aid policy makers in the US toacknowledge linkages between forest conservation and agriculturalproduction, and develop management strategies accordingly.