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    Study finds lands used for grazing can worsen or help climate change

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    When it comes to global climate change, livestock grazing can be either a blessing or a curse, according to a new study, which offers clues on how to tell the difference.

    If managed properly, the study shows, grazing can actually increase the amount of carbon from the air that gets stored in the ground and sequestered for the long run. But if there is too much grazing, soil erosion can result, and the net effect is to cause more carbon losses, so that the land becomes a net carbon source, instead of a carbon sink. And the study found that the latter is far more common around the world today.

    The new work, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, provides ways to determine the tipping point between the two, for grazing lands in a given climate zone and soil type. It also provides an estimate of the total amount of carbon that has been lost over past decades due to livestock grazing, and how much could be removed from the atmosphere if grazing optimization management implemented. The study was carried out by Cesar Terrer, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT; Shuai Ren, a PhD student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences whose thesis is co-supervised by Terrer; and four others.

    “This has been a matter of debate in the scientific literature for a long time,” Terrer says. “In general experiments, grazing decreases soil carbon stocks, but surprisingly, sometimes grazing increases soil carbon stocks, which is why it’s been puzzling.”

    What happens, he explains, is that “grazing could stimulate vegetation growth through easing resource constraints such as light and nutrients, thereby increasing root carbon inputs to soils, where carbon can stay there for centuries or millennia.”

    But that only works up to a certain point, the team found after a careful analysis of 1,473 soil carbon observations from different grazing studies from many locations around the world. “When you cross a threshold in grazing intensity, or the amount of animals grazing there, that is when you start to see sort of a tipping point — a strong decrease in the amount of carbon in the soil,” Terrer explains.

    That loss is thought to be primarily from increased soil erosion on the denuded land. And with that erosion, Terrer says, “basically you lose a lot of the carbon that you have been locking in for centuries.”

    The various studies the team compiled, although they differed somewhat, essentially used similar methodology, which is to fence off a portion of land so that livestock can’t access it, and then after some time take soil samples from within the enclosure area, and from comparable nearby areas that have been grazed, and compare the content of carbon compounds.

    “Along with the data on soil carbon for the control and grazed plots,” he says, “we also collected a bunch of other information, such as the mean annual temperature of the site, mean annual precipitation, plant biomass, and properties of the soil, like pH and nitrogen content. And then, of course, we estimate the grazing intensity — aboveground biomass consumed, because that turns out to be the key parameter.”  

    With artificial intelligence models, the authors quantified the importance of each of these parameters, those drivers of intensity — temperature, precipitation, soil properties — in modulating the sign (positive or negative) and magnitude of the impact of grazing on soil carbon stocks. “Interestingly, we found soil carbon stocks increase and then decrease with grazing intensity, rather than the expected linear response,” says Ren.

    Having developed the model through AI methods and validated it, including by comparing its predictions with those based on underlying physical principles, they can then apply the model to estimating both past and future effects. “In this case,” Terrer says, “we use the model to quantify the historical loses in soil carbon stocks from grazing. And we found that 46 petagrams [billion metric tons] of soil carbon, down to a depth of one meter, have been lost in the last few decades due to grazing.”

    By way of comparison, the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions per year from all fossil fuels is about 10 petagrams, so the loss from grazing equals more than four years’ worth of all the world’s fossil emissions combined.

    What they found was “an overall decline in soil carbon stocks, but with a lot of variability.” Terrer says. The analysis showed that the interplay between grazing intensity and environmental conditions such as temperature could explain the variability, with higher grazing intensity and hotter climates resulting in greater carbon loss. “This means that policy-makers should take into account local abiotic and biotic factors to manage rangelands efficiently,” Ren notes. “By ignoring such complex interactions, we found that using IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] guidelines would underestimate grazing-induced soil carbon loss by a factor of three globally.”

    Using an approach that incorporates local environmental conditions, the team produced global, high-resolution maps of optimal grazing intensity and the threshold of intensity at which carbon starts to decrease very rapidly. These maps are expected to serve as important benchmarks for evaluating existing grazing practices and provide guidance to local farmers on how to effectively manage their grazing lands.

    Then, using that map, the team estimated how much carbon could be captured if all grazing lands were limited to their optimum grazing intensity. Currently, the authors found, about 20 percent of all pasturelands have crossed the thresholds, leading to severe carbon losses. However, they found that under the optimal levels, global grazing lands would sequester 63 petagrams of carbon. “It is amazing,” Ren says. “This value is roughly equivalent to a 30-year carbon accumulation from global natural forest regrowth.”

    That would be no simple task, of course. To achieve optimal levels, the team found that approximately 75 percent of all grazing areas need to reduce grazing intensity. Overall, if the world seriously reduces the amount of grazing, “you have to reduce the amount of meat that’s available for people,” Terrer says.

    “Another option is to move cattle around,” he says, “from areas that are more severely affected by grazing intensity, to areas that are less affected. Those rotations have been suggested as an opportunity to avoid the more drastic declines in carbon stocks without necessarily reducing the availability of meat.”

    This study didn’t delve into these social and economic implications, Terrer says. “Our role is to just point out what would be the opportunity here. It shows that shifts in diets can be a powerful way to mitigate climate change.”

    “This is a rigorous and careful analysis that provides our best look to date at soil carbon changes due to livestock grazing practiced worldwide,” say Ben Bond-Lamberty, a terrestrial ecosystem research scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who was not associated with this work. “The authors’ analysis gives us a unique estimate of soil carbon losses due to grazing and, intriguingly, where and how the process might be reversed.”

    He adds: “One intriguing aspect to this work is the discrepancies between its results and the guidelines currently used by the IPCC — guidelines that affect countries’ commitments, carbon-market pricing, and policies.” However, he says, “As the authors note, the amount of carbon historically grazed soils might be able to take up is small relative to ongoing human emissions. But every little bit helps!”

    “Improved management of working lands can be a powerful tool to combat climate change,” says Jonathan Sanderman, carbon program director of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, who was not associated with this work. He adds, “This work demonstrates that while, historically, grazing has been a large contributor to climate change, there is significant potential to decrease the climate impact of livestock by optimizing grazing intensity to rebuild lost soil carbon.”

    Terrer states that for now, “we have started a new study, to evaluate the consequences of shifts in diets for carbon stocks. I think that’s the million-dollar question: How much carbon could you sequester, compared to business as usual, if diets shift to more vegan or vegetarian?” The answers will not be simple, because a shift to more vegetable-based diets would require more cropland, which can also have different environmental impacts. Pastures take more land than crops, but produce different kinds of emissions. “What’s the overall impact for climate change? That is the question we’re interested in,” he says.

    The research team included Juan Li, Yingfao Cao, Sheshan Yang, and Dan Liu, all with the  Chinese Academy of Sciences. The work was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program, and the Science and Technology Major Project of Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. More

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      in Environment

      MIT researchers remotely map crops, field by field

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      Crop maps help scientists and policymakers track global food supplies and estimate how they might shift with climate change and growing populations. But getting accurate maps of the types of crops that are grown from farm to farm often requires on-the-ground surveys that only a handful of countries have the resources to maintain.

      Now, MIT engineers have developed a method to quickly and accurately label and map crop types without requiring in-person assessments of every single farm. The team’s method uses a combination of Google Street View images, machine learning, and satellite data to automatically determine the crops grown throughout a region, from one fraction of an acre to the next. 

      The researchers used the technique to automatically generate the first nationwide crop map of Thailand — a smallholder country where small, independent farms make up the predominant form of agriculture. The team created a border-to-border map of Thailand’s four major crops — rice, cassava, sugarcane, and maize — and determined which of the four types was grown, at every 10 meters, and without gaps, across the entire country. The resulting map achieved an accuracy of 93 percent, which the researchers say is comparable to on-the-ground mapping efforts in high-income, big-farm countries.

      The team is applying their mapping technique to other countries such as India, where small farms sustain most of the population but the type of crops grown from farm to farm has historically been poorly recorded.

      “It’s a longstanding gap in knowledge about what is grown around the world,” says Sherrie Wang, the d’Arbeloff Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). “The final goal is to understand agricultural outcomes like yield, and how to farm more sustainably. One of the key preliminary steps is to map what is even being grown — the more granularly you can map, the more questions you can answer.”

      Wang, along with MIT graduate student Jordi Laguarta Soler and Thomas Friedel of the agtech company PEAT GmbH, will present a paper detailing their mapping method later this month at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

      Ground truth

      Smallholder farms are often run by a single family or farmer, who subsist on the crops and livestock that they raise. It’s estimated that smallholder farms support two-thirds of the world’s rural population and produce 80 percent of the world’s food. Keeping tabs on what is grown and where is essential to tracking and forecasting food supplies around the world. But the majority of these small farms are in low to middle-income countries, where few resources are devoted to keeping track of individual farms’ crop types and yields.

      Crop mapping efforts are mainly carried out in high-income regions such as the United States and Europe, where government agricultural agencies oversee crop surveys and send assessors to farms to label crops from field to field. These “ground truth” labels are then fed into machine-learning models that make connections between the ground labels of actual crops and satellite signals of the same fields. They then label and map wider swaths of farmland that assessors don’t cover but that satellites automatically do.

      “What’s lacking in low- and middle-income countries is this ground label that we can associate with satellite signals,” Laguarta Soler says. “Getting these ground truths to train a model in the first place has been limited in most of the world.”

      The team realized that, while many developing countries do not have the resources to maintain crop surveys, they could potentially use another source of ground data: roadside imagery, captured by services such as Google Street View and Mapillary, which send cars throughout a region to take continuous 360-degree images with dashcams and rooftop cameras.

      In recent years, such services have been able to access low- and middle-income countries. While the goal of these services is not specifically to capture images of crops, the MIT team saw that they could search the roadside images to identify crops.

      Cropped image

      In their new study, the researchers worked with Google Street View (GSV) images taken throughout Thailand — a country that the service has recently imaged fairly thoroughly, and which consists predominantly of smallholder farms.

      Starting with over 200,000 GSV images randomly sampled across Thailand, the team filtered out images that depicted buildings, trees, and general vegetation. About 81,000 images were crop-related. They set aside 2,000 of these, which they sent to an agronomist, who determined and labeled each crop type by eye. They then trained a convolutional neural network to automatically generate crop labels for the other 79,000 images, using various training methods, including iNaturalist — a web-based crowdsourced  biodiversity database, and GPT-4V, a “multimodal large language model” that enables a user to input an image and ask the model to identify what the image is depicting. For each of the 81,000 images, the model generated a label of one of four crops that the image was likely depicting — rice, maize, sugarcane, or cassava.

      The researchers then paired each labeled image with the corresponding satellite data taken of the same location throughout a single growing season. These satellite data include measurements across multiple wavelengths, such as a location’s greenness and its reflectivity (which can be a sign of water). 

      “Each type of crop has a certain signature across these different bands, which changes throughout a growing season,” Laguarta Soler notes.

      The team trained a second model to make associations between a location’s satellite data and its corresponding crop label. They then used this model to process satellite data taken of the rest of the country, where crop labels were not generated or available. From the associations that the model learned, it then assigned crop labels across Thailand, generating a country-wide map of crop types, at a resolution of 10 square meters.

      This first-of-its-kind crop map included locations corresponding to the 2,000 GSV images that the researchers originally set aside, that were labeled by arborists. These human-labeled images were used to validate the map’s labels, and when the team looked to see whether the map’s labels matched the expert, “gold standard” labels, it did so 93 percent of the time.

      “In the U.S., we’re also looking at over 90 percent accuracy, whereas with previous work in India, we’ve only seen 75 percent because ground labels are limited,” Wang says. “Now we can create these labels in a cheap and automated way.”

      The researchers are moving to map crops across India, where roadside images via Google Street View and other services have recently become available.

      “There are over 150 million smallholder farmers in India,” Wang says. “India is covered in agriculture, almost wall-to-wall farms, but very small farms, and historically it’s been very difficult to create maps of India because there are very sparse ground labels.”

      The team is working to generate crop maps in India, which could be used to inform policies having to do with assessing and bolstering yields, as global temperatures and populations rise.

      “What would be interesting would be to create these maps over time,” Wang says. “Then you could start to see trends, and we can try to relate those things to anything like changes in climate and policies.” More

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      in Security

      Building a better indoor herb garden

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      Randall Briggs ’09, SM ’18 didn’t set out to build indoor gardens when he arrived at MIT. The winner of the 2010 2.007 robot competition class, he was excited to work on designing fighter planes one day.

      But in 2016, halfway through his studies for his master’s degree in mechanical engineering, Briggs’s father passed away unexpectedly. “It was a big blow to me. My motivation took a big hit, so it was hard for me to keep working on my research,” Briggs shares.

      Briggs ordered a home hydroponic garden in the hopes that growing herbs inside his apartment could bring him some positivity. “There is something healing about seeing something organic and beautiful grow and develop,” Briggs says.

      When the garden arrived, Briggs found that many aspects of the design fell short. The plants weren’t getting enough light because the LEDs were dispersing light throughout the room and not focusing it on the plants. “It’s just not very pleasing aesthetically when it’s, like, a fluorescent color of light, and it just fills your room,” Briggs says.

      He set forth to create a better indoor garden. Briggs turned his spare bedroom into a hydroponics lab, testing herbs growing under various lighting conditions and with different nutrient solutions. He read every book and article he could find on the subject. “The same seed pods that I had used in that cheap garden, when I moved them over to my garden, they grew way faster and way healthier and more fragrant and full of flavor,” he says.

      Working on this project became a daily source of joy for Briggs. “Every day when you come home, you want to see if it’s growing a little bit more or to see how they’re doing. I think that made me happy, too.”

      Briggs saw the potential for his garden to improve the well-being of others. “I thought if people had fresh herbs at home, they might be more inspired to cook for themselves instead of always just eating out, as it’s normally a lot healthier to cook your own food at home.”

      After much research and experimentation, GardenByte was born in 2017: a tabletop indoor herb garden that is nearly 3 feet wide with almost 2 feet of height for the plants to grow, which is quite a bit larger than most models on the market. With Briggs’s hydroponics technology, the plants grow three times faster than they would grow outdoors. His garden allows anyone to grow fresh herbs in a wide range of settings. And since plants have a longer shelf life than cut herbs, they also cut down on food waste.

      Briggs was determined to make something that grows plants well and is attractive in a variety of settings. The outer case is handcrafted from solid hardwood from a local Massachusetts lumber yard, ensuring both durability and a visually pleasing aesthetic that seamlessly integrates into any kitchen or restaurant setting. The light bar, crafted from a single piece of crystal-clear acrylic, maintains an unobtrusive and ethereal appearance. This choice complements the overall design while allowing the LED lights to emit a powerful simulation of full sunshine. To ensure a smooth transition from daytime growth to evening, four different types of LEDs were incorporated. Polymer lenses focus the light directly onto the plants, preventing any wastage or unnecessary light spillage in the room. A light and color sensor on top detect the lighting conditions in the room and automatically adjust the lighting in the garden to match, enhancing plant growth. The grid tray is designed to accommodate up to 39 plants at once, offering ample space for an array of herbs. To simplify plant care, the garden is connected to a mobile app that will allow you to care for your plants while you’re away.

      The herb garden contains computer numerical control (CNC) machined-aluminum parts, in contrast with the flimsier plastic most products use. The heat flow capacity of aluminum disperses the heat from all the LEDs and the aluminum grid tray helps keep it compact and thin but rigid, so users can lift the plants up without it bending.

      Briggs received his foundation in machining as an undergrad at the MIT Edgerton Center, where he was on the MIT Motorsports team and MIT Electric Vehicle Team. He learned how to use the CNC machines in the student machine shop at the Area 51 garage under the tutelage of Instructor Pat McAtamney and Briggs’s teammates.

      Building an electric motorcycle on the Electric Vehicle Team for the Isle of Man TT Race in 2011 helped prepare Briggs for creating a robust product for production. The race took place on city streets, raising the potential for deadly crashes. “When we were building that motorcycle, the head of our team, Lennon Rodgers, kept reiterating to us, ‘you got to think aircraft quality, like aircraft quality. This is actually a life-or-death project.’ Seeing the way that he led, and the way that he really set the bar for quality and for execution and kind of kept things moving, was really helpful for me.”

      “My hope in the future is to make a more mass-market version that’s a little bit cheaper and more available to everybody,” Briggs shares.

      The feedback from his first customers has all been positive. After delivering the product to a chef in Boston, Briggs says, “He told me that the whole first evening he was sitting at home with his boyfriend and he just kept staring at it, and he’s like, ‘it is so beautiful. It is so beautiful.’”

      “I feel like something that my dad taught me was that sometimes to do hard things, it does take hard work, and that it’s not always going to be exciting, necessarily,” Briggs shares. “It’s good to be inspired, it’s good to be passionate, but it’s not always going to get you through. And sometimes it’s just hard work that you got to press through the tough parts.” More

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      in Environment

      How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

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      Imagine if France, Germany, and Spain were completely blanketed in forests — and then all those trees were quickly chopped down. That’s nearly the amount of deforestation that occurred globally between 2001 and 2020, with profound consequences.

      Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, producing between 6 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2009 study. Meanwhile, because trees also absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere, they help keep the Earth cooler. And climate change aside, forests protect biodiversity.

      “Climate change and biodiversity make this a global problem, not a local problem,” says MIT economist Ben Olken. “Deciding to cut down trees or not has huge implications for the world.”

      But deforestation is often financially profitable, so it continues at a rapid rate. Researchers can now measure this trend closely: In the last quarter-century, satellite-based technology has led to a paradigm change in charting deforestation. New deforestation datasets, based on the Landsat satellites, for instance, track forest change since 2000 with resolution at 30 meters, while many other products now offer frequent imaging at close resolution.

      “Part of this revolution in measurement is accuracy, and the other part is coverage,” says Clare Balboni, an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). “On-site observation is very expensive and logistically challenging, and you’re talking about case studies. These satellite-based data sets just open up opportunities to see deforestation at scale, systematically, across the globe.”

      Balboni and Olken have now helped write a new paper providing a road map for thinking about this crisis. The open-access article, “The Economics of Tropical Deforestation,” appears this month in the Annual Review of Economics. The co-authors are Balboni, a former MIT faculty member; Aaron Berman, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics; Robin Burgess, an LSE professor; and Olken, MIT’s Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics. Balboni and Olken have also conducted primary research in this area, along with Burgess.

      So, how can the world tackle deforestation? It starts with understanding the problem.

      Replacing forests with farms

      Several decades ago, some thinkers, including the famous MIT economist Paul Samuelson in the 1970s, built models to study forests as a renewable resource; Samuelson calculated the “maximum sustained yield” at which a forest could be cleared while being regrown. These frameworks were designed to think about tree farms or the U.S. national forest system, where a fraction of trees would be cut each year, and then new trees would be grown over time to take their place.

      But deforestation today, particularly in tropical areas, often looks very different, and forest regeneration is not common.

      Indeed, as Balboni and Olken emphasize, deforestation is now rampant partly because the profits from chopping down trees come not just from timber, but from replacing forests with agriculture. In Brazil, deforestation has increased along with agricultural prices; in Indonesia, clearing trees accelerated as the global price of palm oil went up, leading companies to replace forests with palm tree orchards.

      All this tree-clearing creates a familiar situation: The globally shared costs of climate change from deforestation are “externalities,” as economists say, imposed on everyone else by the people removing forest land. It is akin to a company that pollutes into a river, affecting the water quality of residents.

      “Economics has changed the way it thinks about this over the last 50 years, and two things are central,” Olken says. “The relevance of global externalities is very important, and the conceptualization of alternate land uses is very important.” This also means traditional forest-management guidance about regrowth is not enough. With the economic dynamics in mind, which policies might work, and why?

      The search for solutions

      As Balboni and Olken note, economists often recommend “Pigouvian” taxes (named after the British economist Arthur Pigou) in these cases, levied against people imposing externalities on others. And yet, it can be hard to identify who is doing the deforesting.

      Instead of taxing people for clearing forests, governments can pay people to keep forests intact. The UN uses Payments for Environmental Services (PES) as part of its REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) program. However, it is similarly tough to identify the optimal landowners to subsidize, and these payments may not match the quick cash-in of deforestation. A 2017 study in Uganda showed PES reduced deforestation somewhat; a 2022 study in Indonesia found no reduction; another 2022 study, in Brazil, showed again that some forest protection resulted.

      “There’s mixed evidence from many of these [studies],” Balboni says. These policies, she notes, must reach people who would otherwise clear forests, and a key question is, “How can we assess their success compared to what would have happened anyway?”

      Some places have tried cash transfer programs for larger populations. In Indonesia, a 2020 study found such subsidies reduced deforestation near villages by 30 percent. But in Mexico, a similar program meant more people could afford milk and meat, again creating demand for more agriculture and thus leading to more forest-clearing.

      At this point, it might seem that laws simply banning deforestation in key areas would work best — indeed, about 16 percent of the world’s land overall is protected in some way. Yet the dynamics of protection are tricky. Even with protected areas in place, there is still “leakage” of deforestation into other regions. 

      Still more approaches exist, including “nonstate agreements,” such as the Amazon Soy Moratorium in Brazil, in which grain traders pledged not to buy soy from deforested lands, and reduced deforestation without “leakage.”

      Also, intriguingly, a 2008 policy change in the Brazilian Amazon made agricultural credit harder to obtain by requiring recipients to comply with environmental and land registration rules. The result? Deforestation dropped by up to 60 percent over nearly a decade. 

      Politics and pulp

      Overall, Balboni and Olken observe, beyond “externalities,” two major challenges exist. One, it is often unclear who holds property rights in forests. In these circumstances, deforestation seems to increase. Two, deforestation is subject to political battles.

      For instance, as economist Bard Harstad of Stanford University has observed, environmental lobbying is asymmetric. Balboni and Olken write: “The conservationist lobby must pay the government in perpetuity … while the deforestation-oriented lobby need pay only once to deforest in the present.” And political instability leads to more deforestation because “the current administration places lower value on future conservation payments.”

      Even so, national political measures can work. In the Amazon from 2001 to 2005, Brazilian deforestation rates were three to four times higher than on similar land across the border, but that imbalance vanished once the country passed conservation measures in 2006. However, deforestation ramped up again after a 2014 change in government. Looking at particular monitoring approaches, a study of Brazil’s satellite-based Real-Time System for Detection of Deforestation (DETER), launched in 2004, suggests that a 50 percent annual increase in its use in municipalities created a 25 percent reduction in deforestation from 2006 to 2016.

      How precisely politics matters may depend on the context. In a 2021 paper, Balboni and Olken (with three colleagues) found that deforestation actually decreased around elections in Indonesia. Conversely, in Brazil, one study found that deforestation rates were 8 to 10 percent higher where mayors were running for re-election between 2002 and 2012, suggesting incumbents had deforestation industry support.

      “The research there is aiming to understand what the political economy drivers are,” Olken says, “with the idea that if you understand those things, reform in those countries is more likely.”

      Looking ahead, Balboni and Olken also suggest that new research estimating the value of intact forest land intact could influence public debates. And while many scholars have studied deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, fewer have examined the Democratic Republic of Congo, another deforestation leader, and sub-Saharan Africa.

      Deforestation is an ongoing crisis. But thanks to satellites and many recent studies, experts know vastly more about the problem than they did a decade or two ago, and with an economics toolkit, can evaluate the incentives and dynamics at play.

      “To the extent that there’s ambuiguity across different contexts with different findings, part of the point of our review piece is to draw out common themes — the important considerations in determining which policy levers can [work] in different circumstances,” Balboni says. “That’s a fast-evolving area. We don’t have all the answers, but part of the process is bringing together growing evidence about [everything] that affects how successful those choices can be.” More

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      in Environment

      Uncovering how biomes respond to climate change

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      Before Leila Mirzagholi arrived at MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) to begin her postdoc appointment, she had spent most of her time in academia building cosmological models to detect properties of gravitational waves in the cosmos.

      But as a member of Assistant Professor César Terrer’s lab in CEE, Mirzagholi uses her physics and mathematical background to improve our understanding of the different factors that influence how much carbon land ecosystems can store under climate change.

      “What was always important to me was thinking about how to solve a problem and putting all the pieces together and building something from scratch,” Mirzagholi says, adding this was one of the reasons that it was possible for her to switch fields — and what drives her today as a climate scientist.

      Growing up in Iran, Mirzagholi knew she wanted to be a scientist from an early age. As a kid, she became captivated by physics, spending most of her free time in a local cultural center that hosted science events. “I remember in that center there was an observatory that held observational tours and it drew me into science,” says Mirzgholi. She also remembers a time when she was a kid watching the science fiction film “Contact” that introduces a female scientist character who finds evidence of extraterrestrial life and builds a spaceship to make first contact: “After that movie my mind was set on pursuing astrophysics.”

      With the encouragement of her parents to develop a strong mathematical background before pursuing physics, she earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Tehran University. Then she completed a one-year master class in mathematics at Utrecht University before completing her PhD in theoretical physics at Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich. There, Mirzgholi’s thesis focused on developing cosmological models with a focus on phenomenological aspects like propagation of gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background.

      Midway through her PhD, Mirzgholi became discouraged with building models to explain the dynamics of the early universe because there is little new data. “It starts to get personal and becomes a game of: ‘Is it my model or your model?’” she explains. She grew frustrated not knowing when the models she’d built would ever be tested.

      It was at this time that Mirzgholi started reading more about the topics of climate change and climate science. “I was really motivated by the problems and the nature of the problems, especially to make global terrestrial ecology more quantitative,” she says. She also liked the idea of contributing to a global problem that we are all facing. She started to think, “maybe I can do my part, I can work on research beneficial for society and the planet.”

      She made the switch following her PhD and started as a postdoc in the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich, working on understanding the effects of environmental changes on global vegetation activity. After a stint at ETH, where her colleagues collaborated on projects with the Terrer Lab, she relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to join the lab and CEE.

      Her latest article in Science, which was published in July and co-authored by researchers from ETH, shows how global warming affects the timing of autumn leaf senescence. “It’s important to understand the length of the growing season, and how much the forest or other biomes will have the capacity to take in carbon from the atmosphere.” Using remote sensing data, she was able to understand when the growing season will end under a warming climate. “We distinguish two dates — when autumn is onsetting and the leaves are starting to turn yellow, versus when the leaves are 50 percent yellow — to represent the progression of leaf senescence,” she says.

      In the context of rising temperature, when the warming is happening plays a crucial role. If warming temperatures happen before the summer solstice, it triggers trees to begin their seasonal cycles faster, leading to reduced photosynthesis, ending in an earlier autumn. On the other hand, if the warming happens after the summer solstice, it delays the discoloration process, making autumn last longer. “For every degree Celsius of pre-solstice warming, the onset of leaf senescence advances by 1.9 days, while each degree Celsius of post-solstice warming delays the senescence process by 2.6 days,” she explains. Understanding the timing of autumn leaf senescence is essential in efforts to predict carbon storage capacity when modeling global carbon cycles.

      Another problem she’s working on in the Terrer Lab is discovering how deforestation is changing our local climate. How much is it cooling or warming the temperature, and how is the hydrological cycle changing because of deforestation? Investigating these questions will give insight into how much we can depend on natural solutions for carbon uptake to help mitigate climate change. “Quantitatively, we want to put a number to the amount of carbon uptake from various natural solutions, as opposed to other solutions,” she says.

      With year-and-a-half left in her postdoc appointment, Mirzagholi has begun considering her next career steps. She likes the idea of applying to climate scientist jobs in industry or national labs, as well as tenure track faculty positions. Whether she pursues a career in academia or industry, Mirzagholi aims to continue conducting fundamental climate science research. Her multidisciplinary background in physics, mathematics, and climate science has given her a multifaceted perspective, which she applies to every research problem.

      “Looking back, I’m grateful for all my educational experiences from spending time in the cultural center as a kid, my background in physics, the support from colleagues at the Crowther lab at ETH who facilitated my transition from physics to ecology, and now working at MIT alongside Professor Terrer, because it’s shaped my career path and the researcher I am today.” More

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      in Environment

      3 Questions: Can disused croplands help mitigate climate change?

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      As the world struggles to meet internationally agreed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, methods of removing carbon dioxide such as reforestation of cleared areas have become an increasingly important strategy. But little attention has been paid to the potential for abandoned or marginal croplands to be restored to natural vegetation as an additional carbon sink, say MIT assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering César Terrer, recent visiting MIT doctoral student Stephen M. Bell, and six others, in a recent open-access paper in the journal Nature Communications. Here, Terrer and Bell explain the potential use of these “post-agricultural” lands to help in the fight against damaging climate change.

      Q: How significant is the potential of unused agricultural lands as a carbon sink to help mitigate climate change?

      Bell: We know of these huge instances of land abandonment and post-agricultural succession throughout history, like following the collapse of major cities from ancient Mesopotamia to the Mayans. And when the Europeans arrived in the Americas in the 15th century, so many people died and so much forest grew back on abandoned farmland that it helped cool the entire planet and was potentially a driver of the coldest part of the so-called “Little Ice Age” period.

      Today, we have abandoned farmland all over the Mediterranean region, where I did my PhD field work. As young people left rural areas for the cities throughout the 20th century, farmers couldn’t pass on their land to anyone, and the land succeeded back into shrub lands and forests. The biggest recent example of abandonment is for sure the collapse of the Soviet Union, where an estimated 60 million hectares of forest regrew when support for collective farming stopped, resulting in one of the largest carbon sinks ever attributed to a single event.

      So, when we look back at the past, we know there’s potential. Of course, these are huge events, and no one is proposing to replicate anything like that. We need to use land for multiple purposes, but looking back at these big examples, we know there is potential for abandoned or restored agricultural land to be carbon sinks. And so that tells us to dig deeper into this question and get a better idea of realistic scenarios, a better understanding of the climate change mitigation potential of agricultural cessation in the most strategic places.

      Terrer: More than 115 billion tons of carbon have been lost from soils due to agricultural practices that disturb soil integrity — such as tilling, monoculture farming, removing crop residue, excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, and over-grazing. To put this into perspective, the amount of carbon lost is equivalent to the total CO2 emissions ever produced in the United States.

      Our current research synthesizes field data from thousands of experiments, aiming to understand the factors that influence soil carbon accrual in abandoned croplands transitioning back to forests or natural grasslands. We’re working to quantify the potential for carbon sequestration in these soils over 30-, 50-, and 100-year time frames and mapping the areas with the greatest potential for carbon storage. This includes both increases in soil carbon and in vegetation biomass.

      Q: What are some of the key uncertainties in evaluating this potential for unused cropland to serve as a carbon sink, and how could those uncertainties be addressed?

      Bell: We use this word uncertainties in two ways. Specifically, the longevity of potential recarbonization, and the intensity of the potential recarbonization. Those are two factors, two aspects that we need to quantify to reduce our uncertainty.

      So, how long will the land recarbonize, regardless of the intensity? If the carbon level is going up, that’s good. If there’s more carbon increasing in the soil, we know that it came from somewhere, it came from the atmosphere. But how long does that happen? We know soil can get saturated. It can reach its carbon capacity limit, it won’t continue to increase the carbon stock, and the recarbonization curve will flatten out. When does that happen? Is it after a hundred years? Is it after 20 years?

      But the world’s soils are very diverse and complex, so what might be true in one place is not true in another place. It may take a longer time to reach saturation for more fertile soils in the Midwest U.S. than less fertile soils in the Southwest, for example. Alternatively, sometimes soils in drier areas like in the Southwest may never reach true saturation if they are degraded and have stalled recovery following abandonment.

      The second uncertainty is intensity: How high on the y-axis on the chart of recarbonization does saturation occur? With the analogy comparing U.S. soils, you might have a relatively huge carbon increase on an abandoned farm in the Southwest, but because the soil is not very carbon-rich it’s not a large increase in absolute terms. In the Midwest, there might only be a small relative increase, but that increase could be much more in total than in the Southwest. These are just nuances to keep in mind as we look at this at the global scale.

      These nuances are essentially uncertainties. Soil carbon responses to agricultural land abandonment is complicated, and unfortunately it hasn’t been studied in much detail so far. We need to reduce those uncertainties to get a better understanding of the recarbonization potential. This is easier said than done because not only do we have these temporal data uncertainties, but we also have spatial uncertainties. We don’t have very good maps of past and present post-agricultural landscapes.

      Q: Can this potential use of post-agricultural lands be implemented without putting global food supplies at risk? How can these needs be balanced?

      Terrer: As to whether utilizing post-agricultural lands for carbon sequestration can be implemented without jeopardizing global food supplies, and how to balance these needs, our recent research provides valuable insights.

      The challenge, of course, lies in balancing cropland restoration for climate mitigation with food security for a growing global population. Abandoned croplands represent an opportunity for carbon sequestration without impacting active agricultural lands. However, the available area of abandoned croplands is insufficient to make a substantial impact on climate mitigation on its own.

      Thus, our proposal also emphasizes the importance of closing yield gaps, which involves increasing crop production per hectare to its theoretical limits. This would enable us to maintain or even increase global crop yields using only a fraction of the currently cultivated area, allowing the remaining land to be dedicated to climate mitigation efforts. By pursuing this strategy, we estimate that over half of the amount of soil carbon lost so far due to agriculture could be recovered, while ensuring food security for the world’s population. More

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      J-WAFS announces 2023 seed grant recipients

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      Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) announced its ninth round of seed grants to support innovative research projects at MIT. The grants are designed to fund research efforts that tackle challenges related to water and food for human use, with the ultimate goal of creating meaningful impact as the world population continues to grow and the planet undergoes significant climate and environmental changes.Ten new projects led by 15 researchers from seven different departments will be supported this year. The projects address a range of challenges by employing advanced materials, technology innovations, and new approaches to resource management. The new projects aim to remove harmful chemicals from water sources, develop monitoring and other systems to help manage various aquaculture industries, optimize water purification materials, and more.“The seed grant program is J-WAFS’ flagship grant initiative,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “The funding is intended to spur groundbreaking MIT research addressing complex issues that are challenging our water and food systems. The 10 projects selected this year show great promise, and we look forward to the progress and accomplishments these talented researchers will make,” she adds.The 2023 J-WAFS seed grant researchers and their projects are:Sara Beery, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), is building the first completely automated system to estimate the size of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest (PNW).Salmon are a keystone species in the PNW, feeding human populations for the last 7,500 years at least. However, overfishing, habitat loss, and climate change threaten extinction of salmon populations across the region. Accurate salmon counts during their seasonal migration to their natal river to spawn are essential for fisheries’ regulation and management but are limited by human capacity. Fish population monitoring is a widespread challenge in the United States and worldwide. Beery and her team are working to build a system that will provide a detailed picture of the state of salmon populations in unprecedented, spatial, and temporal resolution by combining sonar sensors and computer vision and machine learning (CVML) techniques. The sonar will capture individual fish as they swim upstream and CVML will train accurate algorithms to interpret the sonar video for detecting, tracking, and counting fish automatically while adapting to changing river conditions and fish densities.Another aquaculture project is being led by Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor in Ocean Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Robert Vincent, the assistant director at MIT’s Sea Grant Program. They are working with Otto Cordero, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, to control harmful bacteria blooms in aquaculture algae feed production.

      Aquaculture in the United States represents a $1.5 billion industry annually and helps support 1.7 million jobs, yet many American hatcheries are not able to keep up with demand. One barrier to aquaculture production is the high degree of variability in survival rates, most likely caused by a poorly controlled microbiome that leads to bacterial infections and sub-optimal feed efficiency. Triantafyllou, Vincent, and Cordero plan to monitor the microbiome composition of a shellfish hatchery in order to identify possible causing agents of mortality, as well as beneficial microbes. They hope to pair microbe data with detail phenotypic information about the animal population to generate rapid diagnostic tests and explore the potential for microbiome therapies to protect larvae and prevent future outbreaks. The researchers plan to transfer their findings and technology to the local and regional aquaculture community to ensure healthy aquaculture production that will support the expansion of the U.S. aquaculture industry.

      David Des Marais is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His 2023 J-WAFS project seeks to understand plant growth responses to elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, in the hopes of identifying breeding strategies that maximize crop yield under future CO2 scenarios.Today’s crop plants experience higher atmospheric CO2 than 20 or 30 years ago. Crops such as wheat, oat, barley, and rice typically increase their growth rate and biomass when grown at experimentally elevated atmospheric CO2. This is known as the so-called “CO2 fertilization effect.” However, not all plant species respond to rising atmospheric CO2 with increased growth, and for the ones that do, increased growth doesn’t necessarily correspond to increased crop yield. Using specially built plant growth chambers that can control the concentration of CO2, Des Marais will explore how CO2 availability impacts the development of tillers (branches) in the grass species Brachypodium. He will study how gene expression controls tiller development, and whether this is affected by the growing environment. The tillering response refers to how many branches a plant produces, which sets a limit on how much grain it can yield. Therefore, optimizing the tillering response to elevated CO2 could greatly increase yield. Des Marais will also look at the complete genome sequence of Brachypodium, wheat, oat, and barley to help identify genes relevant for branch growth.Darcy McRose, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is researching whether a combination of plant metabolites and soil bacteria can be used to make mineral-associated phosphorus more bioavailable.The nutrient phosphorus is essential for agricultural plant growth, but when added as a fertilizer, phosphorus sticks to the surface of soil minerals, decreasing bioavailability, limiting plant growth, and accumulating residual phosphorus. Heavily fertilized agricultural soils often harbor large reservoirs of this type of mineral-associated “legacy” phosphorus. Redox transformations are one chemical process that can liberate mineral-associated phosphorus. However, this needs to be carefully controlled, as overly mobile phosphorus can lead to runoff and pollution of natural waters. Ideally, phosphorus would be made bioavailable when plants need it and immobile when they don’t. Many plants make small metabolites called coumarins that might be able to solubilize mineral-adsorbed phosphorus and be activated and inactivated under different conditions. McRose will use laboratory experiments to determine whether a combination of plant metabolites and soil bacteria can be used as a highly efficient and tunable system for phosphorus solubilization. She also aims to develop an imaging platform to investigate exchanges of phosphorus between plants and soil microbes.Many of the 2023 seed grants will support innovative technologies to monitor, quantify, and remediate various kinds of pollutants found in water. Two of the new projects address the problem of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), human-made chemicals that have recently emerged as a global health threat. Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are used in many manufacturing processes. These chemicals are known to cause significant health issues including cancer, and they have become pervasive in soil, dust, air, groundwater, and drinking water. Unfortunately, the physical and chemical properties of PFAS render them difficult to detect and remove.Aristide Gumyusenge, the Merton C. Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is using metal-organic frameworks for low-cost sensing and capture of PFAS. Most metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are synthesized as particles, which complicates their high accuracy sensing performance due to defects such as intergranular boundaries. Thin, film-based electronic devices could enable the use of MOFs for many applications, especially chemical sensing. Gumyusenge’s project aims to design test kits based on two-dimensional conductive MOF films for detecting PFAS in drinking water. In early demonstrations, Gumyusenge and his team showed that these MOF films can sense PFAS at low concentrations. They will continue to iterate using a computation-guided approach to tune sensitivity and selectivity of the kits with the goal of deploying them in real-world scenarios.Carlos Portela, the Brit (1961) and Alex (1949) d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Ariel Furst, the Cook Career Development Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, are building novel architected materials to act as filters for the removal of PFAS from water. Portela and Furst will design and fabricate nanoscale materials that use activated carbon and porous polymers to create a physical adsorption system. They will engineer the materials to have tunable porosities and morphologies that can maximize interactions between contaminated water and functionalized surfaces, while providing a mechanically robust system.Rohit Karnik is a Tata Professor and interim co-department head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is working on another technology, his based on microbead sensors, to rapidly measure and monitor trace contaminants in water.Water pollution from both biological and chemical contaminants contributes to an estimated 1.36 million deaths annually. Chemical contaminants include pesticides and herbicides, heavy metals like lead, and compounds used in manufacturing. These emerging contaminants can be found throughout the environment, including in water supplies. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States sets recommended water quality standards, but states are responsible for developing their own monitoring criteria and systems, which must be approved by the EPA every three years. However, the availability of data on regulated chemicals and on candidate pollutants is limited by current testing methods that are either insensitive or expensive and laboratory-based, requiring trained scientists and technicians. Karnik’s project proposes a simple, self-contained, portable system for monitoring trace and emerging pollutants in water, making it suitable for field studies. The concept is based on multiplexed microbead-based sensors that use thermal or gravitational actuation to generate a signal. His proposed sandwich assay, a testing format that is appealing for environmental sensing, will enable both single-use and continuous monitoring. The hope is that the bead-based assays will increase the ease and reach of detecting and quantifying trace contaminants in water for both personal and industrial scale applications.Alexander Radosevich, a professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry, are teaming up to create rapid, cost-effective, and reliable techniques for on-site arsenic detection in water.Arsenic contamination of groundwater is a problem that affects as many as 500 million people worldwide. Arsenic poisoning can lead to a range of severe health problems from cancer to cardiovascular and neurological impacts. Both the EPA and the World Health Organization have established that 10 parts per billion is a practical threshold for arsenic in drinking water, but measuring arsenic in water at such low levels is challenging, especially in resource-limited environments where access to sensitive laboratory equipment may not be readily accessible. Radosevich and Swager plan to develop reaction-based chemical sensors that bind and extract electrons from aqueous arsenic. In this way, they will exploit the inherent reactivity of aqueous arsenic to selectively detect and quantify it. This work will establish the chemical basis for a new method of detecting trace arsenic in drinking water.Rajeev Ram is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His J-WAFS research will advance a robust technology for monitoring nitrogen-containing pollutants, which threaten over 15,000 bodies of water in the United States alone.Nitrogen in the form of nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, and urea can run off from agricultural fertilizer and lead to harmful algal blooms that jeopardize human health. Unfortunately, monitoring these contaminants in the environment is challenging, as sensors are difficult to maintain and expensive to deploy. Ram and his students will work to establish limits of detection for nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, and urea in environmental, industrial, and agricultural samples using swept-source Raman spectroscopy. Swept-source Raman spectroscopy is a method of detecting the presence of a chemical by using a tunable, single mode laser that illuminates a sample. This method does not require costly, high-power lasers or a spectrometer. Ram will then develop and demonstrate a portable system that is capable of achieving chemical specificity in complex, natural environments. Data generated by such a system should help regulate polluters and guide remediation.Kripa Varanasi, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Angela Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor and head of the Department of Biological Engineering, will join forces to develop an affordable water disinfection technology that selectively identifies, adsorbs, and kills “superbugs” in domestic and industrial wastewater.Recent research predicts that antibiotic-resistance bacteria (superbugs) will result in $100 trillion in health care expenses and 10 million deaths annually by 2050. The prevalence of superbugs in our water systems has increased due to corroded pipes, contamination, and climate change. Current drinking water disinfection technologies are designed to kill all types of bacteria before human consumption. However, for certain domestic and industrial applications there is a need to protect the good bacteria required for ecological processes that contribute to soil and plant health. Varanasi and Belcher will combine material, biological, process, and system engineering principles to design a sponge-based water disinfection technology that can identify and destroy harmful bacteria while leaving the good bacteria unharmed. By modifying the sponge surface with specialized nanomaterials, their approach will be able to kill superbugs faster and more efficiently. The sponge filters can be deployed under very low pressure, making them an affordable technology, especially in resource-constrained communities.In addition to the 10 seed grant projects, J-WAFS will also fund a research initiative led by Greg Sixt. Sixt is the research manager for climate and food systems at J-WAFS, and the director of the J-WAFS-led Food and Climate Systems Transformation (FACT) Alliance. His project focuses on the Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) of East Africa. The second-largest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Victoria straddles three countries (Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya) and has a catchment area that encompasses two more (Rwanda and Burundi). Sixt will collaborate with Michael Hauser of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, and Paul Kariuki, of the Lake Victoria Basin Commission.The group will study how to adapt food systems to climate change in the Lake Victoria Basin. The basin is facing a range of climate threats that could significantly impact livelihoods and food systems in the expansive region. For example, extreme weather events like droughts and floods are negatively affecting agricultural production and freshwater resources. Across the LVB, current approaches to land and water management are unsustainable and threaten future food and water security. The Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC), a specialized institution of the East African Community, wants to play a more vital role in coordinating transboundary land and water management to support transitions toward more resilient, sustainable, and equitable food systems. The primary goal of this research will be to support the LVBC’s transboundary land and water management efforts, specifically as they relate to sustainability and climate change adaptation in food systems. The research team will work with key stakeholders in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to identify specific capacity needs to facilitate land and water management transitions. The two-year project will produce actionable recommendations to the LVBC. More

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      Inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge aims to develop enhanced crop variants and move them from lab to land

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      According to MIT’s charter, established in 1861, part of the Institute’s mission is to advance the “development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.” Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) is one of the driving forces behind water and food-related research on campus, much of which relates to agriculture. In 2022, J-WAFS established the Water and Food Grand Challenge Grant to inspire MIT researchers to work toward a water-secure and food-secure future for our changing planet. Not unlike MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges, the J-WAFS Grand Challenge seeks to leverage multiple areas of expertise, programs, and Institute resources. The initial call for statements of interests returned 23 letters from MIT researchers spanning 18 departments, labs, and centers. J-WAFS hosted workshops for the proposers to present and discuss their initial ideas. These were winnowed down to a smaller set of invited concept papers, followed by the final proposal stage. 

      Today, J-WAFS is delighted to report that the inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge Grant has been awarded to a team of researchers led by Professor Matt Shoulders and research scientist Robert Wilson of the Department of Chemistry. A panel of expert, external reviewers highly endorsed their proposal, which tackles a longstanding problem in crop biology — how to make photosynthesis more efficient. The team will receive $1.5 million over three years to facilitate a multistage research project that combines cutting-edge innovations in synthetic and computational biology. If successful, this project could create major benefits for agriculture and food systems worldwide.

      “Food systems are a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and they are also increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. That’s why when we talk about climate change, we have to talk about food systems, and vice versa,” says Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research. “J-WAFS is central to MIT’s efforts to address the interlocking challenges of climate, water, and food. This new grant program aims to catalyze innovative projects that will have real and meaningful impacts on water and food. I congratulate Professor Shoulders and the rest of the research team on being the inaugural recipients of this grant.”

      Shoulders will work with Bryan Bryson, associate professor of biological engineering, as well as Bin Zhang, associate professor of chemistry, and Mary Gehring, a professor in the Department of Biology and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Robert Wilson from the Shoulders lab will be coordinating the research effort. The team at MIT will work with outside collaborators Spencer Whitney, a professor from the Australian National University, and Ahmed Badran, an assistant professor at the Scripps Research Institute. A milestone-based collaboration will also take place with Stephen Long, a professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The group consists of experts in continuous directed evolution, machine learning, molecular dynamics simulations, translational plant biochemistry, and field trials.

      “This project seeks to fundamentally improve the RuBisCO enzyme that plants use to convert carbon dioxide into the energy-rich molecules that constitute our food,” says J-WAFS Director John H. Lienhard V. “This difficult problem is a true grand challenge, calling for extensive resources. With J-WAFS’ support, this long-sought goal may finally be achieved through MIT’s leading-edge research,” he adds.

      RuBisCO: No, it’s not a new breakfast cereal; it just might be the key to an agricultural revolution

      A growing global population, the effects of climate change, and social and political conflicts like the war in Ukraine are all threatening food supplies, particularly grain crops. Current projections estimate that crop production must increase by at least 50 percent over the next 30 years to meet food demands. One key barrier to increased crop yields is a photosynthetic enzyme called Ribulose-1,5-Bisphosphate Carboxylase/Oxygenase (RuBisCO). During photosynthesis, crops use energy gathered from light to draw carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and transform it into sugars and cellulose for growth, a process known as carbon fixation. RuBisCO is essential for capturing the CO2 from the air to initiate conversion of CO2 into energy-rich molecules like glucose. This reaction occurs during the second stage of photosynthesis, also known as the Calvin cycle. Without RuBisCO, the chemical reactions that account for virtually all carbon acquisition in life could not occur.

      Unfortunately, RuBisCO has biochemical shortcomings. Notably, the enzyme acts slowly. Many other enzymes can process a thousand molecules per second, but RuBisCO in chloroplasts fixes less than six carbon dioxide molecules per second, often limiting the rate of plant photosynthesis. Another problem is that oxygen (O2) molecules and carbon dioxide molecules are relatively similar in shape and chemical properties, and RuBisCO is unable to fully discriminate between the two. The inadvertent fixation of oxygen by RuBisCO leads to energy and carbon loss. What’s more, at higher temperatures RuBisCO reacts even more frequently with oxygen, which will contribute to decreased photosynthetic efficiency in many staple crops as our climate warms.

      The scientific consensus is that genetic engineering and synthetic biology approaches could revolutionize photosynthesis and offer protection against crop losses. To date, crop RuBisCO engineering has been impaired by technological obstacles that have limited any success in significantly enhancing crop production. Excitingly, genetic engineering and synthetic biology tools are now at a point where they can be applied and tested with the aim of creating crops with new or improved biological pathways for producing more food for the growing population.

      An epic plan for fighting food insecurity

      The 2023 J-WAFS Grand Challenge project will use state-of-the-art, transformative protein engineering techniques drawn from biomedicine to improve the biochemistry of photosynthesis, specifically focusing on RuBisCO. Shoulders and his team are planning to build what they call the Enhanced Photosynthesis in Crops (EPiC) platform. The project will evolve and design better crop RuBisCO in the laboratory, followed by validation of the improved enzymes in plants, ultimately resulting in the deployment of enhanced RuBisCO in field trials to evaluate the impact on crop yield. 

      Several recent developments make high-throughput engineering of crop RuBisCO possible. RuBisCO requires a complex chaperone network for proper assembly and function in plants. Chaperones are like helpers that guide proteins during their maturation process, shielding them from aggregation while coordinating their correct assembly. Wilson and his collaborators previously unlocked the ability to recombinantly produce plant RuBisCO outside of plant chloroplasts by reconstructing this chaperone network in Escherichia coli (E. coli). Whitney has now established that the RuBisCO enzymes from a range of agriculturally relevant crops, including potato, carrot, strawberry, and tobacco, can also be expressed using this technology. Whitney and Wilson have further developed a range of RuBisCO-dependent E. coli screens that can identify improved RuBisCO from complex gene libraries. Moreover, Shoulders and his lab have developed sophisticated in vivo mutagenesis technologies that enable efficient continuous directed evolution campaigns. Continuous directed evolution refers to a protein engineering process that can accelerate the steps of natural evolution simultaneously in an uninterrupted cycle in the lab, allowing for rapid testing of protein sequences. While Shoulders and Badran both have prior experience with cutting-edge directed evolution platforms, this will be the first time directed evolution is applied to RuBisCO from plants.

      Artificial intelligence is changing the way enzyme engineering is undertaken by researchers. Principal investigators Zhang and Bryson will leverage modern computational methods to simulate the dynamics of RuBisCO structure and explore its evolutionary landscape. Specifically, Zhang will use molecular dynamics simulations to simulate and monitor the conformational dynamics of the atoms in a protein and its programmed environment over time. This approach will help the team evaluate the effect of mutations and new chemical functionalities on the properties of RuBisCO. Bryson will employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to search the RuBisCO activity landscape for optimal sequences. The computational and biological arms of the EPiC platform will work together to both validate and inform each other’s approaches to accelerate the overall engineering effort.

      Shoulders and the group will deploy their designed enzymes in tobacco plants to evaluate their effects on growth and yield relative to natural RuBisCO. Gehring, a plant biologist, will assist with screening improved RuBisCO variants using the tobacco variety Nicotiana benthamianaI, where transient expression can be deployed. Transient expression is a speedy approach to test whether novel engineered RuBisCO variants can be correctly synthesized in leaf chloroplasts. Variants that pass this quality-control checkpoint at MIT will be passed to the Whitney Lab at the Australian National University for stable transformation into Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco), enabling robust measurements of photosynthetic improvement. In a final step, Professor Long at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will perform field trials of the most promising variants.

      Even small improvements could have a big impact

      A common criticism of efforts to improve RuBisCO is that natural evolution has not already identified a better enzyme, possibly implying that none will be found. Traditional views have speculated a catalytic trade-off between RuBisCO’s specificity factor for CO2 / O2 versus its CO2 fixation efficiency, leading to the belief that specificity factor improvements might be offset by even slower carbon fixation or vice versa. This trade-off has been suggested to explain why natural evolution has been slow to achieve a better RuBisCO. But Shoulders and the team are convinced that the EPiC platform can unlock significant overall improvements to plant RuBisCO. This view is supported by the fact that Wilson and Whitney have previously used directed evolution to improve CO2 fixation efficiency by 50 percent in RuBisCO from cyanobacteria (the ancient progenitors of plant chloroplasts) while simultaneously increasing the specificity factor. 

      The EPiC researchers anticipate that their initial variants could yield 20 percent increases in RuBisCO’s specificity factor without impairing other aspects of catalysis. More sophisticated variants could lift RuBisCO out of its evolutionary trap and display attributes not currently observed in nature. “If we achieve anywhere close to such an improvement and it translates to crops, the results could help transform agriculture,” Shoulders says. “If our accomplishments are more modest, it will still recruit massive new investments to this essential field.”

      Successful engineering of RuBisCO would be a scientific feat of its own and ignite renewed enthusiasm for improving plant CO2 fixation. Combined with other advances in photosynthetic engineering, such as improved light usage, a new green revolution in agriculture could be achieved. Long-term impacts of the technology’s success will be measured in improvements to crop yield and grain availability, as well as resilience against yield losses under higher field temperatures. Moreover, improved land productivity together with policy initiatives would assist in reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture. With more “crop per drop,” reductions in water consumption from agriculture would be a major boost to sustainable farming practices.

      “Our collaborative team of biochemists and synthetic biologists, computational biologists, and chemists is deeply integrated with plant biologists and field trial experts, yielding a robust feedback loop for enzyme engineering,” Shoulders adds. “Together, this team will be able to make a concerted effort using the most modern, state-of-the-art techniques to engineer crop RuBisCO with an eye to helping make meaningful gains in securing a stable crop supply, hopefully with accompanying improvements in both food and water security.” More

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      MIT PhD students honored for their work to solve critical issues in water and food

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      In 2017, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) initiated the J-WAFS Fellowship Program for outstanding MIT PhD students working to solve humankind’s water-related challenges. Since then, J-WAFS has awarded 18 fellowships to students who have gone on to create innovations like a pump that can maximize energy efficiency even with changing flow rates, and a low-cost water filter made out of sapwood xylem that has seen real-world use in rural India. Last year, J-WAFS expanded eligibility to students with food-related research. The 2022 fellows included students working on micronutrient deficiency and plastic waste from traditional food packaging materials. 

      Today, J-WAFS has announced the award of the 2023-24 fellowships to Gokul Sampath and Jie Yun. A doctoral student in the Department of Urban Studies and planning, Sampath has been awarded the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions, which is supported through a generous gift from Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. Yun, who is in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received a J-WAFS Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions, which is funded by the J-WAFS Research Affiliate Program. Currently, Xylem, Inc. and GoAigua are J-WAFS’ Research Affiliate companies. A review committee comprised of MIT faculty and staff selected Sampath and Yun from a competitive field of outstanding graduate students working in water and food who were nominated by their faculty advisors. Sampath and Yun will receive one academic semester of funding, along with opportunities for networking and mentoring to advance their research.

      “Both Yun and Sampath have demonstrated excellence in their research,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “They also stood out in their communication skills and their passion to work on issues of agricultural sustainability and resilience and access to safe water. We are so pleased to have them join our inspiring group of J-WAFS fellows,” she adds.

      Using behavioral health strategies to address the arsenic crisis in India and Bangladesh

      Gokul Sampath’s research centers on ways to improve access to safe drinking water in developing countries. A PhD candidate in the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, his current work examines the issue of arsenic in drinking water sources in India and Bangladesh. In Eastern India, millions of shallow tube wells provide rural households a personal water source that is convenient, free, and mostly safe from cholera. Unfortunately, it is now known that one-in-four of these wells is contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic at levels dangerous to human health. As a result, approximately 40 million people across the region are at elevated risk of cancer, stroke, and heart disease from arsenic consumed through drinking water and cooked food. 

      Since the discovery of arsenic in wells in the late 1980s, governments and nongovernmental organizations have sought to address the problem in rural villages by providing safe community water sources. Yet despite access to safe alternatives, many households still consume water from their contaminated home wells. Sampath’s research seeks to understand the constraints and trade-offs that account for why many villagers don’t collect water from arsenic-safe government wells in the village, even when they know their own wells at home could be contaminated.

      Before coming to MIT, Sampath received a master’s degree in Middle East, South Asian, and African studies from Columbia University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and history from the University of California at Davis. He has long worked on water management in India, beginning in 2015 as a Fulbright scholar studying households’ water source choices in arsenic-affected areas of the state of West Bengal. He also served as a senior research associate with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where he conducted randomized evaluations of market incentives for groundwater conservation in Gujarat, India. Sampath’s advisor, Bishwapriya Sanyal, the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning at MIT, says Sampath has shown “remarkable hard work and dedication.” In addition to his classes and research, Sampath taught the department’s undergraduate Introduction to International Development course, for which he received standout evaluations from students.

      This summer, Sampath will travel to India to conduct field work in four arsenic-affected villages in West Bengal to understand how social influence shapes villagers’ choices between arsenic-safe and unsafe water sources. Through longitudinal surveys, he hopes to connect data on the social ties between families in villages and the daily water source choices they make. Exclusionary practices in Indian village communities, especially the segregation of water sources on the basis of caste and religion, has long been suspected to be a barrier to equitable drinking water access in Indian villages. Yet despite this, planners seeking to expand safe water access in diverse Indian villages have rarely considered the way social divisions within communities might be working against their efforts. Sampath hopes to test whether the injunctive norms enabled by caste ties constrain villagers’ ability to choose the safest water source among those shared within the village. When he returns to MIT in the fall, he plans to dive into analyzing his survey data and start work on a publication.

      Understanding plant responses to stress to improve crop drought resistance and yield

      Plants, including crops, play a fundamental role in Earth’s ecosystems through their effects on climate, air quality, and water availability. At the same time, plants grown for agriculture put a burden on the environment as they require energy, irrigation, and chemical inputs. Understanding plant/environment interactions is becoming more and more important as intensifying drought is straining agricultural systems. Jie Yun, a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is studying plant response to drought stress in the hopes of improving agricultural sustainability and yield under climate change.  Yun’s research focuses on genotype-by-environment interaction (GxE.) This relates to the observation that plant varieties respond to environmental changes differently. The effects of GxE in crop breeding can be exploited because differing environmental responses among varieties enables breeders to select for plants that demonstrate high stress-tolerant genotypes under particular growing conditions. Yun bases her studies on Brachypodium, a model grass species related to wheat, oat, barley, rye, and perennial forage grasses. By experimenting with this species, findings can be directly applied to cereal and forage crop improvement. For the first part of her thesis, Yun collaborated with Professor Caroline Uhler’s group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Uhler’s computational tools helped Yun to evaluate gene regulatory networks and how they relate to plant resilience and environmental adaptation. This work will help identify the types of genes and pathways that drive differences in drought stress response among plant varieties.  David Des Marais, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is Yun’s advisor. He notes, “throughout Jie’s time [at MIT] I have been struck by her intellectual curiosity, verging on fearlessness.” When she’s not mentoring undergraduate students in Des Marais’ lab, Yun is working on the second part of her project: how carbon allocation in plants and growth is affected by soil drying. One result of this work will be to understand which populations of plants harbor the necessary genetic diversity to adapt or acclimate to climate change. Another likely impact is identifying targets for the genetic improvement of crop species to increase crop yields with less water supply. Growing up in China, Yun witnessed environmental issues springing from the development of the steel industry, which caused contamination of rivers in her hometown. On one visit to her aunt’s house in rural China, she learned that water pollution was widespread after noticing wastewater was piped outside of the house into nearby farmland without being treated. These experiences led Yun to study water supply and sewage engineering for her undergraduate degree at Shenyang Jianzhu University. She then went on to complete a master’s program in civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. It was there that Yun discovered a passion for plant-environment interactions; during an independent study on perfluorooctanoic sulfonate, she realized the amazing ability of plants to adapt to environmental changes, toxins, and stresses. Her goal is to continue researching plant and environment interactions and to translate the latest scientific findings into applications that can improve food security. More