Principal Investigators:  John Antle, Susan Capalbo, Siân Mooney, and Keith Paustian
Funding:  National Science Foundation, Models and Methods for Integrated Assessment Program

Compliance with international agreements such as the Kyoto protocol requires that policy outcomes meet accepted scientific standards and be verifiable. Assessing policies to increase carbon sequestration in agriculture will require economic models to estimate the effects of alternative policies on farmers' land use and management decisions and ecological models to estimate how farmers' behavior affects soil carbon (C).

Agricultural production systems are characterized by spatially variable economic and biophysical processes and as such, their measurement is scale dependent. This means that the results of the same analysis may vary depending on the areal unit (that is, scale) chosen for the study.

An integrated assessment conducted at an inappropriate scale could furnish misleading estimates of economic and biophysical outcomes and lead to the development of inefficient policies. This research will provide a theoretical foundation for identifying an appropriate scale for integrated assessment modeling of agricultural production systems that can form the basis for formulating such policies. In addition, this research will investigate methods for comparing alternative specifications of integrated economic and bio-physical models. Specifically this research will:

1. Develop a conceptual and empirical framework for determining the economically optimal spatial scale for integrated assessment of agricultural production systems that are characterized by spatially variable economic and bio-physical processes. The economically optimal spatial scale is defined as the scale that maximizes the net benefits of information produced.
2. Apply this framework to the case of soil carbon sequestration in the Great Plains region of the United States and use this example to investigate methods to compare alternative spatial scale specifications of integrated economic and bio-physical models. These results will have broad applicability as heuristics for determining the optimal spatial scale for integrated assessment of C-sequestration in any location.