Pioneer Center for Landscape Research in Sustainable Agricultural Futures

The overall aim for the Pioneer Center for Landscape Research in Sustainable Agricultural Futures (Land-CRAFT) is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector, while restoring the health of managed and adjacent natural ecosystems and allowing for increasing agricultural productivity. Particular focus will be on understanding and mapping carbon and nitrogen balances in agricultural landscapes and the associated emissions of nitrous oxide and leaching of nitrate, the two most important environmental impacts associated with the agricultural nitrogen use.

In particular, the center will achieve these objectives by assessing how changes in agricultural practices are affecting nutrient and GHG fluxes at landscape scales. It will combine on-site and remote sensing observation and modeling tools to identify suitable agroecological approaches which allow for effective climate mitigation as well as adaptation of agricultural systems to climate change.

The center is established in a collaboration between Aarhus University and the University of Copenhagen, and also involves researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Colorado State University in the United States.

Professor Klaus Butterbach-Bahl is the head of Land-CRAFT and he comes from a position as Head of the Division of Terrestrial Biogeochemistry at the Department of Meteorology, Atmospheric Environmental Research at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. He is highly regarded for his research in biogeochemistry of both natural and managed ecosystems, and he has been a leading force in the development of nitrogen cycling processes, in understanding of nitrous oxide emissions from land to atmosphere and how to measure and model environmental N losses and its impacts on ecosystems at various spatio-temporal scales.

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