Kelsey Emard (right) collects data on a Willamette Valley farm. Photo courtesy of Kelsey Emard
By Abby P. Metzger
Fall/Winter 2023
Global climate models help scientists explore possible futures of our changing planet — where will sea-level rise hit first and fastest? How much warming can we expect in the next 50 years? The next 100? And how might this warming destabilize ecosystems?
Policymakers use the results of climate models to ask such large-scale questions as they work toward making societally important decisions. But, can the results of climate models guide individual action? College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences geography professor Kelsey Emard wants to know how people might use climate models in their everyday lives and livelihoods. What might a global climate model mean to an individual farmer?
Photo of Kelsey Emard by Kim Kenny
The intersection of climate change and people’s lives is a comfortable space for Emard. She is a human-environment geographer, which “means I am really interested in how social and environmental processes connect,” she says.
“All of my projects explore economic, political, cultural or social drivers and processes at multiple scales, and how these intersect with big environmental problems like drought, invasive species and climate change,” she says. “Geography allows me to think about all of those things at the same time.”
Originally from Oregon, Emard has roots in agriculture. Her mother’s family farmed corn and peaches on Sauvie Island near Portland, and her father came from a ranching family. When her family moved to southern Oregon near Klamath Falls, Emard was immersed in a complex, social patchwork — water conflict, Indigenous rights, drought, endangered fish species and settler farming all overlapped.
“Certainly, growing up in that environment shaped my feeling that you can’t solve environmental problems by just thinking about the physical system,” she says. “So many issues weave together to create these complex situations that are not easily solved.”
Emard earned a degree in business management and eventually went to graduate school in geography. After earning her Ph.D. at Penn State, she came straight to her post at Oregon State University in a kind of homecoming (her parents still live in Oregon).
Perhaps inspired by her agricultural background, Emard seized an opportunity to research whether climate models could be useful within a community familiar to her: farming.
Farmers already pay acute attention to short-term and seasonal conditions — soil moisture, precipitation, temperature and year-to-year weather comparisons. Emard wondered how Willamette Valley farmers might engage with longer-term climate models. For example, if the projected number of freezing days is expected to decline in the future, would that information convince a farmer to plant a different variety of peach? Even more interesting, could farming practices and knowledge be incorporated back into climate models, helping such models be more precise in their predictions?
Exploring those questions took Emard and her graduate student, Olivia Cameron, to 25 different farms throughout the Willamette Valley.
“When we showed up at the farms, we wouldn’t talk about climate change data at all. We would walk the farms and get an understanding of how they were engaging with their land,” Emard says.
These interviews allowed Emard and Cameron to glean important information on everything from soil management practices to how water moves through a farmer’s property. Farmers also came together for focus groups where they were given a range of climate data and projections to interact with and discuss. The researchers’ intent was to learn how climate data may be useful to these Willamette Valley farmers, and whether the data aligns with their observations and deep familiarity with the land.
Emard and Cameron found that farmers, in general, were unlikely to use climate data in everyday decisions. Global climate data are simply not specific enough to the farmers’ region, let alone field. But the study participants had another idea: They indicated that climate models would be far more useful if they incorporated specific farming practices around tilling and soil management. Then farmers might be able to use the resulting data to better understand if, for example, minimal or no-till practices really do create carbon sinks by keeping carbon locked in the ground, or whether no-till improves yield and retains more soil moisture over time. Framers were also interested in how cover cropping might influence soil and air temperatures. Knowing such information could help farmers make longer-term choices.
“By learning how these practices feed back into environmental processes, we could potentially get a better, deeper and more representative view of how our climate system is going to work in 60 years, or 100 years,” Emard says.
Emard is now working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado on how to make good on the farmers’ suggestions and incorporate their crop practices into climate models. She and her collaborators are excited to see how the integration of farmers’ practices into the models can help us more precisely understand the role of people in this system.
Ultimately, Emard is most keen to make her research useful and improve the usability of climate data. “I’m really motivated to work with rural communities,” she says. “There are often divisions between climate science and agriculture, and I want to be somebody who can sit at the intersection of the two.”
