Workshop on Large-Scale Modelling for Scotland’s Future Food & Environment

Workshop on Large-Scale Modelling for Scotland’s Future Food & Environment
Event Date
Event Location
ECCI, Edinburgh, UK

Agenda

09:30 Coffee and Registration

10:00 Welcome and Introductions

  • Introductory presentation by Gary Polhill outlining vision and approach to large-scale modelling: ECCI2024-Polhill.pdf

10:30 Overview of large-scale modelling research being undertaken

  • Presentation by Alessandro Gimona and Marie Castellazzi on planning tools for landscape-level restoration: ECCI2024-Gimona.pdf
  • Presentation by Ben McCormick, Nick Roxburgh and Gary Polhill on nutrient supply through the food chain: ECCI2024-McCormick.pdf

11:20 Discussion: Linking large-scale modelling to the current policy landscape

13:00 World Cafe #1 -- A deeper dive into the reearch and collaboration discussions

14:50 World Cafe #2 -- A deeper dive into the research and collaboration discussions

16:15 Discussion: What role can large-scale modelling play in policy support, today?

Details of the event from the Eventbrite site:

This event is for policy professionals affiliated to Scottish Government who:

  • want to find out more about scenario-based large scale modelling research being carried out to support Scotland's future food systems and environment; and
  • are interested in building partnerships with researchers to support their policy analysis needs.

It is being organised by the James Hutton Institute (JHI) and RESAS. It features cutting edge research being undertaken for RESAS by researchers from the JHI, Rowett Institute, BIOSS and SRUC. The research themes and questions include:

Supporting agriculture across the food value chain in uncertain times

Research Area 1: Land Capability for Agriculture (LCA) Research Platform and “Our Smart Farm” tool

  • How might climate change impact the capability of land to support different land uses?
  • How can farmers improve management of their land at field-scale to enhance productivity and resource use efficiency sustainably?

Research Area 2: Simulation of how businesses produce and transform agricultural goods along the food value chain

  • How might farm businesses respond to changes in subsidies?
  • What is the supply of nutrients from Scottish agriculture?

Systems approaches and simulation for disease control

Research Area 3: Case study using simulation of the Scottish cattle trading industry, to investigate the role of farmer trading behaviour on the success of endemic disease control programs

  • How do farms adapt trading behaviours in response to disease control measures
  • How to control livestock disease in a way that aligns with farm business needs?
  • How effective would a trading health scheme be in controlling disease?

Landscape-level habitat restoration

Research Area 4: Planning tools for landscape-level restoration based on enhancing multiple benefits from Nature-Based Solutions

  • Which areas of the landscape could be restored to address: … habitat connectivity, the reduction of diffuse pollution, soil erosion and GHGs emissions, and the alleviation of flooding?

Development of rapid response capabilities to answer policy queries

Research Area 5: Rapid-response modelling for urgent policy queries

  • Researchers have built protocols to enable rapid-response model adaptation for varied scenario-based policy questions.
  • How could such protocols be used to support existing policy analysis processes?

A soil monitoring framework for Scotland

Research area 6: Developing Scotland’s soils data and designing a soil monitoring framework for Scotland.

  • What are the socio-economic impacts of soil degradation in Scotland?
  • How do we represent changes in soils in large scale modelling?