The Dashboard for Agricultural Water Use and Nutrient Management | DAWN
DAWN is an online toolkit for U.S. Midwest corn producers, designed to support and inform short-term and seasonal planning with field-level forecasts ranging out to six months.
Research Program
Supporting Agricultural Decision-Making
Seasonal weather prediction is notoriously difficult, but significant advances in recent years have led to improved outlooks. However, these improvements are not always accessible to end-users such as farmers, despite their value for agricultural decision-making. To make these improved outlooks more accessible and support increasingly complex decisions given extreme weather events and climate variability, DAWN is developing an online toolkit that uses a new regional forecast model with precipitation and temperature predictions tailored to the Corn Belt region.
Funding
DAWN is supported by the United States Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Grant number: 2020-68012-31674.
Partner Organization(s)
University of Maryland
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
Colorado State University
UnCommon Farms
Project Director
Professor
Co-Project Director and Extension Team Lead
Director of Research & Knowledge Initiatives
Translating Seasonal Forecasts into Predictive Agricultural Tools
As weather patterns increasingly deviate from historical tendencies, farmers face complex seasonal planning decisions as they work to manage risk while maintaining profitability. The subseasonal-to-seasonal (two weeks to six months) period has been notoriously difficult to predict, but recent scientific advances have improved the ability to forecast weather and the associated agricultural outcomes for Midwest locations.
To make this research useful for and accessible to agricultural producers, researchers must translate their findings into formats familiar to and used by farmers. The interdisciplinary DAWN project team is building a forecast-driven, user-friendly toolkit geared towards providing users with improved predictive information in user-targeted forms.
The project emphasizes decision support research, which involves collaboration and conversation between groups with different professional languages and knowledge bases, to make DAWN effective and useful for target stakeholders. Researchers and software developers rely on guidance and feedback from extension experts and other agricultural stakeholders to translate knowledge into effective tools for use by corn producers. The work is ongoing, with the Climate-Weather Research Forecast (CWRF) model and toolkit being improved with modifications and updates.
Freely available, the DAWN toolkit is fine-tuned for corn producers in the U.S. Midwest. The toolkit offers resources, such as the Crop Progress Tool and the Growing Degree Days Tool, that take seasonal weather predictions and tailor them to the needs of corn farmers, who can customize the results for their farmfields. These predictions and tools can support farmers with seasonal planning and crop management decisions.
Meet the Project Team
Project Leads
Melissa Kenney
Fellow
Since 2019
Staff
Since 2019
Director of Research & Knowledge Initiatives
Institute on the Environment