Combining forestry and farming may be one way to mitigate the impact of farming on climate change

Supply & Demand Beyond Economics

In studying and designing climate-smart systems we have to consider both supply and demand. On one hand, we consider the supply side and the constraints of the environment on providing sufficient productive agricultural land and water supply, as well as the pressures of land degradation on soil fertility as elements that need to be managed in order to supply enough food.

On the other hand, there is the demand side, with a rapidly growing and urbanising global population, which is creating demand pressures on the supply chains that link up the system.

By working embedded in a commercial farming operation, researchers at the University of Leeds are looking for ways to improve the functioning of this system in a way that is climate-smart both locally and globally.

Technology & Precision for both mitigation and adaptation

At the University of Leeds Research Farm we are creating a digitally connected smart farm, operating at commercial scale. From soil carbon studies and crop resilience research to flux towers measuring atmospheric carbon above the field

The Research Farm is an environmental observatory embedded within a 320-hectare commercial farming operation. The farm operations and the environmental observing systems are being linked to create a digitally connected smart farm which partners with other sites and research facilities around the world.

Local Measurements, Globally connected

Using these field measurements, as well as those from partner sites around the world, as data sources, we are carrying out biogeochemical modelling which seeks to understand how agriculture can be more climate resilient, while contributing to climate change mitigation.

Soil carbon storage

The soil stores significantly more carbon than either the atmosphere or living plants do, making soil carbon storage a significant potential asset in climate change mitigation. Meanwhile, conventional farming techniques tend to degrade soil while reducing the carbon stored within them. We are working to reverse the impact of farming on climate change.

Future research

Climate-smart agriculture is key to reaching Net Zero targets in the UK. To help drive this goal, Leeds academics are working with research partners and government agencies to improve sustainability for farmers, providing insights into how soil management can reduce environmental pollution from agriculture. Managing soil differently could enhance its potential to sequester carbon, and farmers could be given guidance on how to improve their practises from the results of the research.

Research Facilities and Active Research Projects

The Institute of Atmospheric Science

The Institute of Atmospheric Science in the School of Earth and Environment is ranked 25th in the world for Atmospheric Science in the Shanghai Ranking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2021.

This critical mass of tier-1 atmospheric and climate science expertise enables the establishment of a world-leading atmospheric observatory that is integrated with the University farm observatory. The observatory will be a secure site housing a full suite of atmospheric instrumentation with the option to add more for specific field trials. Instrumentation will include a next generation AeroEcology radar that will be able to detect single animals as small as 1mm (entomology) and as large as 2m (a focus on bird detection). This radar fills a capability gap in the UK.

Met office and COSMOS-UK Site

The University of Leeds Research Farm is also the site for the UK Met Office weather station in the region and the COSMOS-UK network site. The stations are situated on the boundary between two large arable fields that slope very gently to the north, east and south. Data from both long-term monitoring stations can be accessed to help with research and field trials. The Met Office Weather station is a standard set up which includes atmospheric pressure, air temperature and humidity, wind speed and direction and precipitation. In addition, the COSMOS includes net radiation (incoming and outgoing long and short-wave radiation), potential evaporation, daily mean albedo, soil moisture content at multiple depths (5-50cm) and soil temperature profiles at multiple depths (2-50cm). You can view the live data from the site here: https://cosmos.ceh.ac.uk/sites/SPENF

BioDAR project

In the 21st century, large-scale insect declines have been described extensively in the scientific literature and reported with considerable hype in the mainstream media. These insects and other small invertebrates provide vital ecosystem services as food for other, larger organisms, pollinators of crops, and controllers of pests and diseases. What has been recognised now is that the data on which the insect decline narrative is based is sparse in space and time and heterogeneous in structure. The Leeds-led BioDAR project will provide a consistent and extensive new dataset that can be used to monitor insect populations using existing weather radar networks. BioDAR will operate across the UK with potential application around the world to other radar networks.

Vertical-looking radar – next generation aeroecology radar

While weather radar networks are capable of mapping biodiversity at large scales, there exists a critical gap in the global environmental science equipment pool for a device that is capable of high-resolution recording of flying organisms at smaller scales. The Leeds Research Farm’s vertical-looking radar (VLR) will fill this gap. The VLR is a next generation aeroecology radar that can detect single animals as small as 1mm (a focus on entomological detection) and as large as 2m (a focus on bird detection). Integrating both entomological, chiropterological (bats) and ornithological detection into a single device enables substantial breakthroughs in aeroecology that complements efforts like the NERC-funded BioDAR project that uses meteorological radar to looks at scales larger than 1km2. The Research Farm is the ideal place to develop and host such an instrument, given the combined expertise in radar engineering, atmospheric physics and biodiversity science. The device itself is be built around robust, commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) marine radar technology and utilises data acquisition and analyses methods that extend the abilities of the earlier generation radars to include dual-polarisation capabilities to overlap with the large-scale observations enabled by weather radar networks.

This set of instrumentation supports the study of crop phenotyping, crop development, disease dynamics, yield, pollination, and providing of co-benefits (ecosystem services). The instrumentation will allow systematically monitoring vegetation from leaf to field to landscape scales.

Field-level hyperspectral imaging with a drone will allow linking up point measured spectra to satellite imagery. A handheld spectroradiometer will measure point spectra of crops and non-cropped areas at different growth stages. A farmers-oriented eBee Plus fixed wing autonomous drone will test how methods developed with high-end UAV can be adapted by farmers and how monitoring approaches may be potentially commercialized as data services.

A precision crop harvester will map harvest yields at meter-resolutions and link those to remote sensed time series observations. This is particularly important for testing precision agriculture approaches to crop production, as it enables checking of the uniformity of the final products. Additional investment in basic farm tractor and implements is included in this capability and required for all agriculture research operations. A portable instrument will measure leaf-level photosynthesis and chlorophyll fluorescence. The monitoring capability will utilise state-of-art workstations to performed complex GIS, airborne and satellite remote sensing analysis.

A chamber system to analyse fluxes from crops and soil

An automated chamber system with CO2, H2O, CH4, N2O analyser to monitor fluxes from growing crops/soil. The equipment improves quantification of carbon, water and nitrogen balance as well as global warming potential (GWP) of agricultural practices at the farm.