Adaptation of CQESTR carbon cycle model for Brazilian edaphoclimatic conditions

Abstract

Climate change is a reality and can cause serious impacts on agricultural production in the world, especially in Brazil. Thus, in 2009 the Brazilian government established the National Policy on Climate Change (NPCC) and created in 2010 the Low Carbon Agriculture Plan (ABC) for sustainable agricultural production to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Because of the difficulty, the high cost and long period to conduct field studies, an alternative to evaluate the Brazilian production systems is through modeling and simulation. The advantage of using models is to test various scenarios, such as: changes in land use, reduced precipitation and increased temperature. The modeling is therefore an important tool for assessing environmental impacts that can be used for decision making and for credit line, e.g. for the ABC Plan. Despite the advantages that the models can offer to the NPCC, they were developed and calibrated to temperate conditions. This proposal aims to improve the carbon cycle modeling to assess most accurate CO2 emissions in agricultural production systems used in the country. In this project, we will use the CQESTR model, whose requirements are easy to obtain. The project will consist of (i) simulating Brazilian agricultural production systems, (ii) understanding source code, (iii) identifying problems in simulating tropical conditions, (iv) proposing and evaluating solutions and (v) testing model with suggested changes. Experimental data will be acquired from Embrapa's Pecus and Fluxus projects, which measure greenhouse gases and carbon stock in livestock and grain production systems, respectively. (AU)