2007 ended on a happy note: On December 13, Federico Bert defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Buenos Aires' School of Agronomy. His thesis work was graded as "outstanding" by an external review committee.

Federico's thesis, titled "Evaluación de oportunidades e impedimentos para el uso de información climática en sistemas agrícolas pampeanos" (An assessment of opportunities and impediments for the use of climate information in agricultural systems of the Pampas) was conducted in the framework of CNH-1 activities funded by the National Science Foundation.

Federico's doctoral work was overseen by Emilio , Guillermo Podestá and Carlos Messina (who are all investigators in the CNH-2 project), and was supported by Argentina's Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). Federico will remain involved in CNH-2 activities as a postdoc.

Rick Katz (National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado) visited Buenos Aires in November 2007. A central purpose of his visit was to meet with colleagues from Argentina's Met Service to discuss collaborative research as part of CNH-2. Rick met with Silvia Núñez and Maru Skansi from the Argentine Meteorological Service to discuss how he intends to model the wet and dry epochs in the climate of the Argentine Pampas as shifts between different climate regimes.

Rick took advantage of the visit to give a seminar at the University of Buenos Aires' Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences. The topic of the talk was his work on the use of general linear models (GLMs) to generate synthetic daily weather series. This work, conducted in collaboration with NCAR postdoc Eva Furrer, was supported by previous NSF Coupled Natural and Human Systems funding.

See Rick's talk on GLM-based stochastic weather generators (PDF, 1867 KB).

See Furrer and Katz paper on GLM-based stochastic weather generators (PDF, 813 KB).

On November 12-14, 2007, Xavier González (University of Buenos Aires, School of Engineering), Federico Bert (University of Buenos Aires, School of Agronomy) and Guillermo Podestá (Univ. of Miami) attended a training course on Repast, the software framework for agent based modeling and simulation (ABMS) that will be used during the CNH-2 project.

The course, held at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, was taught by Dr. Michael North, Deputy Director of Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation. Dr. North also is a co-PI in the CNH-2 project.

After the course, a planning meeting was held with colleagues from Argonne's Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation: Drs. Chick Macal, Mike North and Pamela Sydelko, new collaborators that join this team for CNH-2.

Visit the WWW site for Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Complex Adaptive Systems

In the new project, emphasis shifts from “one farmer, one farm” modeling to agent-based models that allow explicit differences among actors (e.g., socioeconomic and/or personality characteristics), social and spatial interactions among farmers and other actors, and cross-scale exploration of regional patterns emerging from individual decisions and interactions.

In this WWW site we will refer to the new project as "CNH-2", to distinguish it from the earlier research supported by the Coupled Natural and Human Systems initiative.

Complex environmentally and socially relevant problems have led to a renewed focus on interdisciplinary teams as producers of knowledge. One of the highlights of this project is a self reflective study of this emerging model for organizing scientific and technological research.

Cecilia Hidalgo, Claudia Natenzon and Guillermo Podestá have published a paper exploring the factors that foster or impede interdisciplinary knowledge production, including the participation of stakeholders. The article (see abstract) appeared in Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad (CTS).

CTS is an academic journal edited by Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos (OEI), Instituto Universitario de Estudios de la Ciencia y la Tecnología from Universidad de Salamanca, and Centro de Estudios sobre Ciencia, Desarrollo y Educación Superior (REDES, Argentina). The journal addresses the relation between science, technology and society within the cultural and political environments of Ibero-American societies.

 Visit the WWW site for this journal

An article ("Recomendaciones a Medida") was published in the October 2007 issue of the AACREA Magazine describing how agronomic management can be tailored to the risk preferences or financial characteristics of a farmer. Project investigators F. Bert, C. Laciana, G. Podestá and E. Weber used a combination of crop simulation models, optimizer software and a suite of alternative objective functions to explore what managements would be most suitable, for example, for a highly risk-averse farmer.

See full version of article [in Spanish] (PDF, 4.1 MB)

On July 31, 2007, Silvia Núñez and Maru Skansi from the Argentine Meteorological Service offered a training module on decadal-scale climate variability and its implications for agriculture in the Argentine Pampas.

The training was part of the 2007 Capacity Building Program for Technical Advisors, organized by Fundación AACREA (FundaCREA). The training course involves six modules, 50 hours of lectures, and one of its objectives is to review the use of knowledge systems to manage risk in agricultural production systems.

The first Argentine Congress of Social Studies of Science and Technology was held in Bernal, Argentina on 5-6 July 2007. The event, jointly organized by the Universidad de Quilmes and the Universidad de San Martín, aimed to provide an interdisciplinary perspective of socially relevant issues in science and technology.

Two presentations were made by project investigators:

Hidalgo, C., C.E. Natenzon and G. Podestá. Construcción interdisciplinaria de conocimiento: el caso de un proyecto internacional sobre variabilidad climática y agricultura.

Celis A. and P. Forni. De los satélites geoestacionarios y las boyas oceánicas a los productores pampeanos: La red de generación y diseminación de información climática potencialmente útil para la actividad agropecuaria en la región pampeana.

 Visit the Congress WWW site

Federico Bert made an invited presentation on "El valor de la información climática en los cultivos de maíz y soja. Analizando el impacto de escenarios de mediano y largo plazo sobre la producción y su resultado económico" [The value of climate information for maize and soybean cropping systems - Analyzing the impact of medium and long-term scenarios on production and economic results] at MundoAgro 2007, held in Buenos Aires on 26 June 2007.

MundoAgro is an annual event attended by over one thousand people linked with agribusiness and agricultural production in Argentina. The scientific agenda of this event was coordinated by Dr. Emilio Satorre, project investigator.

Bert's extended abstract [in Spanish] (PDF, 268 KB)

Bert's presentation [in Spanish] (PDF, 1.14 MB)

 Press release on Bert's presentation

 Visit MundoAgro's WWW site

The third annual meeting of the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) took place at Columbia University, New York City, 3-4 May 2006. CRED is an interdisciplinary center that studies individual and group decision making under climate uncertainty and decision making in the face of environmental risk. As many investigators in this project (Podestá, Weber, Broad, Laciana) are involved in CRED activities, considerable synergy is derived from both projects.

One of CRED's field studies is focused on decision-making in the Argentine Pampas. For more information on CRED, visit CRED's WWW site.