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Operational Tillage Information System (OpTIS) tillage, residue, and soil health practice dataset

    CTIC has partnered with Applied GeoSolutions and The Nature Conservancy on the development, testing and application of the Operational Tillage Information System (OpTIS), an automated system to map tillage, residue cover, winter cover, and soil health practices using remote sensing data. While OpTIS calculations are performed at the farm-field scale using publicly available data, the privacy of individual producers is fully protected by reporting only spatially-aggregated results at regional and watershed scales. OpTIS-based data are currently available for the years 2005 through 2018 for the US Corn Belt, including all of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa, as well as parts of: Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

    Useful to Usable: Developing usable climate science for agriculture

      Useful to Usable (U2U): Transforming Climate Variability and Change Information for Cereal Crop Producers, was a USDA-funded research and extension project designed to improve the resilience and profitability of U.S. farms in the Corn Belt amid a changing climate. Over a six-year period from April 2011 - April 2017, 122 faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students from ten Midwestern universities contributed to this interdisciplinary project. Our team integrated expertise in applied climatology, crop modeling, agronomy, cyber-technology, agricultural economics, sociology, Extension and outreach, communication, and marketing to improve the use and uptake of climate information for agricultural decision making. Together, and with members of the agricultural community, we developed a series of decision support tools, resource materials, and training methods to support data-driven decision making and the adoption of climate-resilient practices.

      Sustainable Corn CAP Research Data (USDA-NIFA Award No. 2011-68002-30190)

        The Sustainable Corn CAP (Cropping Systems Coordinated Agricultural Project: Climate Change, Mitigation, and Adaptation in Corn-based Cropping Systems) was a multi-state transdisciplinary project supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (Award No. 2011-68002-30190). Research experiments were located through the U.S. Corn Belt and examined farm-level adaptation practices for corn-based cropping systems to current and predicted impacts of climate change.