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ARS Home » Plains Area » Fort Collins, Colorado » Center for Agricultural Resources Research » Water Management and Systems Research » Research » Research Project #440320

Research Project: Process Modeling, Machine Learning, and Computational Tools for Watershed Modeling from Fire to Field

Location: Water Management and Systems Research

Project Number: 3012-13660-010-003-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement

Start Date: Aug 1, 2021
End Date: May 31, 2025

Objective:
The Cooperator will support ARS application of the Agricultural Ecosystems Services (AgES) model to watersheds and fields from the Rocky Mountains to the Great Plains ("Fire to Farm").

Approach:
Activities include development of computational services for model execution, data provisioning, watershed delineation, model calibration and parameter sensitivity analysis, emulation of AgES results using machine learning, and evaluation of precision conservation scenarios. The Cloud Services Integration Platform and Catena Analytics developed by the Cooperator will be used to deploy the AgES model-as-a-service and tools for open-source cloud computing. Multi-Group Particle Swarm Optimization will be deployed and tested for AgES calibration on multiple cloud platforms. These services will be used to simulate agricultural systems from plots to watershed scales for precision agriculture and conservation, and snow-dominated mountainous watershed with effects of fire and forest recovery. A machine learning framework will be evaluated for emulation process-based simulations using surrogate models.