Tara Troy, assistant professor of water resources engineering at Lehigh University, will present "The Impact of Climate and Irrigation on Crop Yields" at 3:30 p.m., Nov. 18 in the Hardin Hall auditorium (Room 107). The seminar is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be provided.
Climate variability and extremes are expected to increase due to climate change, which may have significant negative impacts for agricultural production. Previous work has primarily focused on the impact of mean growing season temperature and precipitation on rainfed crop yields, often at the field scale or through the use of a crop model.
Little work has focused on irrigated crop yields at larger spatial scales to understand the interplay between climate, cereal crop yields and irrigation as a buffer. This talk will quantify yield gains due to irrigation under climate variability across the western U.S., the impact of climate extremes on rainfed and irrigated yields, and the exposure of the major growing regions to climate extremes.
Troy's research lies at the intersection of climate, water and food, with a particular interest in understanding the role of climate variability on water supply and demand across a variety of scales. She joined Lehigh's faculty in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2013. Prior to Lehigh, Troy was an associate research scientist for the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University, with projects about flood risk and water sustainability. She received her Ph.D. in 2010 from Princeton University, with her dissertation focused on quantifying the drivers and impacts of climate change on land surface hydrology over northern Eurasia during the past century.
More details at: http://go.unl.edu/4jgp