The Nature Conservancy: Hannah Birgé, Ph.D, Chosen As A Recipient Of A New Innovator In Food And Agriculture Research Award

New Milford CT

23 April, 2022

12:09 AM

Description

Press release from The Nature Conservancy: April 20, 2022 Birgé is one of nine selected by the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) announced last week the recipients of the New Innovator in Food & Agriculture Research Award, an award granted to early career scientists supporting research in one of FFAR's Challenge Areas. Scientists in the early years of their careers often have difficulty pursuing innovative research due to the pressure of securing funding. "Our New Innovator Awardees are pursuing creative, audacious research to overcome challenges to our food and agriculture system. Thanks to these awards, they have one less hurdle to achieving pioneering results," said Lucyna Kurtyka, FFAR senior scientific program director. Birgé's award is $170,333. Meet Hannah Birgé Soil scientist Hannah Birgé is director of agriculture for The Nature Conservancy's Nebraska program. She leads a team of experts who work with farmers and researchers to implement on-farm solutions—like adoption of cover crops, no-till and crop diversification practices—that deliver both economic and environmental benefits. Birgé's Research A promise of big data is the ability to better understand and predict relevant social-ecological phenomena. However, modern machine learning and statistical analyses of big data often fail to embed the human context needed to uncover and predict these phenomena more fully. In this project, Birgé reframes the challenge of predicting cover crop adoption on working farms as social-ecological, rather than strictly technical. To do this she is engaging farmers to create regression trees—a type of decision-making algorithm—that describe individual farm-level decisions to adopt cover crops. These regression trees can then be tested using large, remotely sensed biophysical datasets. By eliciting farmer expert knowledge in this way, Birgé can improve the efficacy of big data to predict not only when and where cover crops are likely to be adopted on the landscape but also why. This press release was produced by The Nature Conservancy. The views expressed here are the author's own.