Consuelo Romero, research assistant professor in UNL’s School of Natural Resources, will present “Evaluating the Effect of Uncertainty in Selected Soil Parameters on Crop Yield Using a Crop Model: How Does This Relate to Crop Yield Productions Due to Climate Change?” at 3:30 p.m. Oct. 8 in the Hardin Hall auditorium, Room 107. The seminar is free and open to the public.
Crop models have become powerful tools to estimate crop yields. Many gaps concerning the lack of biophysical data to successfully run a model, however, still need to be filled.
Soil data is one such gap, and little effort has been put forth to estimate the uncertainty generated due to soil data. Romero will show the results of an uncertainty analysis for the soil component of the Peanut-CROPGRO v4.5 model to evaluate yield outputs.
Her strategy involved generating equally probable soil profile descriptions by slightly changing values in selected soil parameter within a range of possible true values. Romero will also explain the uncertainty found as equivalent changes in crop yield take place due to projected changes in temperature, precipitation and CO2.
Romero earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in soil science from La Molina National Agricultural University in Lima, Peru. She received a Ph.D. in production ecology from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Florida in water use in urban areas.
Romero is also currently a research assistant professor at UNL’s School of Natural Resources, where her projects involve the analysis of anomalous climate conditions and their impacts on crop production in the continental U.S., increasing water use efficiency of crop systems through the use of simulation models in the U.S. and the Horn of Africa countries, and modeling soil erosion in the Colombian Andes.
