Climate Change

Lab Seminar: Modeling externalities from forest management and fire mitigation

Frederik Strabo presented preliminary work modeling how competition between adjacent landowners can shape their incentives to invest in forest fire prevention. The combination of historical land use practices and climate change have greatly increased the risk and severity of forest fires. Landowners can mitigate these risks by investing in costly interventions like forest thinning. They can also adjust to these risks by changing when (and if) they harvest the trees in their forests.

Lab Seminar - A New Field-Level Measure of the Stock of Soil Organic Carbon.

Devin Serfas presented findings from his work developing and applying models of soil carbon dynamics to field-level soil and crop production data from Saskatchewan. Agricultural soil carbon sequestration is considered by many to be an important method for reducing atmospheric carbon. Agricultural practices and production decisions affect the rate at which carbon from the atmosphere enters the soil and the rate at which carbon from the soil mineralizes and leaves the soil as CO2.