Publications by authors named "Benjamin R K Runkle"

Article Synopsis
  • Carbon-rich peat soils used for agriculture have lost significant carbon due to drainage, but wet crop cultivation, especially rice, could help reduce CO and NO emissions while maintaining agricultural production.
  • Water table and soil management strategies can affect methane emissions from rice cultivation and influence how rice plants distribute their biomass.
  • The study found that lower water tables and the addition of mineral soil reduced belowground biomass and methane emissions, suggesting that managing these factors could be a viable strategy for lowering methane emissions in wet rice cultivation.
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Metals and metalloids (hereafter, metal(loid)s) in plant-based foods are a source of exposure to humans, but not all metal(loid)-food interactions are the same. Differences exist between metal(loid)s in terms of their behavior in soils and in how they are taken up by plants and stored in the edible plant tissue/food. Thus, there cannot be one consistent solution to reducing toxic metal(loid)s exposure to humans from foods.

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Management and design affect systems' ability to deliver ecosystem services and meet sustainable intensification needs for a growing population. Soil-plant-animal health evaluations at the systems level for conventional and silvopastoral environments are lacking and challenge adoption across temperate regions. Impacts of silvopasture on soil quality, microclimate, cattle heat stress, forage quality and yield, and cattle weight gain were compared to a conventional pasture in the mid-southern US.

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Article Synopsis
  • High-latitude surface energy budgets (SEBs) are important for understanding land-climate interactions in the Arctic, but uncertainties in their predictions remain.
  • A study analyzed SEB observations from 1994 to 2021 and found that vegetation type is a key predictor of SEB components during Arctic summers, often matching or exceeding differences seen between vegetation and glacier surfaces.
  • The study also revealed that the timing of SEB fluxes varies significantly with vegetation type, affecting snow-cover dynamics and suggesting that better representations of Arctic vegetation in models could enhance future Earth system predictions.
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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multispectral sensors offer high spatial and temporal resolution imagery for monitoring crop stress at early stages of development. Analysis of UAV-derived data with advanced machine learning models could improve real-time management in agricultural systems, but guidance for this integration is currently limited. Here we compare two deep learning-based strategies for early warning detection of crop stress, using multitemporal imagery throughout the growing season to predict field-scale yield in irrigated rice in eastern Arkansas.

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Nature-based Climate Solutions are landscape stewardship techniques to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase soil or biomass carbon sequestration. These mitigation approaches to climate change present an opportunity to supplement energy sector decarbonization and provide co-benefits in terms of ecosystem services and landscape productivity. The biological engineering profession must be involved in the research and implementation of these solutions-developing new tools to aid in decision-making, methods to optimize across different objectives, and new messaging frameworks to assist in prioritizing among different options.

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Nature-based Climate Solutions (NbCS) are managed alterations to ecosystems designed to increase carbon sequestration or reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While they have growing public and private support, the realizable benefits and unintended consequences of NbCS are not well understood. At regional scales where policy decisions are often made, NbCS benefits are estimated from soil and tree survey data that can miss important carbon sources and sinks within an ecosystem, and do not reveal the biophysical impacts of NbCS for local water and energy cycles.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Wetlands are significant sources of methane (CH4) but add uncertainty to global CH4 budgets due to complex controls on its dynamics; this study explores how various environmental predictors influence methane flux across different wetland types over various time scales.
  • - Key environmental factors affecting methane flux include soil and air temperatures and water table depth (WTD), with findings showing that changes in methane emissions can lag behind fluctuations in these variables by several days.
  • - The study utilizes various statistical methods to highlight that both physical processes, like evaporation, and biological factors, such as photosynthesis, play crucial roles in methane release, enhancing the understanding of wetland methane dynamics.
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Wetland methane (CH) emissions ([Formula: see text]) are important in global carbon budgets and climate change assessments. Currently, [Formula: see text] projections rely on prescribed static temperature sensitivity that varies among biogeochemical models. Meta-analyses have proposed a consistent [Formula: see text] temperature dependence across spatial scales for use in models; however, site-level studies demonstrate that [Formula: see text] are often controlled by factors beyond temperature.

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Irrigated rice requires intense water management under typical agronomic practices. Cost effective tools to improve the efficiency and assessment of water use is a key need for industry and resource managers to scale ecosystem services. In this research we advance model-based decomposition and machine learning to map inundated rice using time-series polarimetric, -band Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) observations.

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Eddy covariance measurement systems provide direct observation of the exchange of greenhouse gases between ecosystems and the atmosphere, but have only occasionally been intentionally applied to quantify the carbon dynamics associated with specific climate mitigation strategies. Natural climate solutions (NCS) harness the photosynthetic power of ecosystems to avoid emissions and remove atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO), sequestering it in biological carbon pools. In this perspective, we aim to determine kinds of NCS strategies are most suitable for ecosystem-scale flux measurements and these measurements should be deployed for diverse NCS scales and goals.

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Rice cultivation contributes 11% of the global 308 Tg CH anthropogenic emissions. The alternate wetting and drying (AWD) irrigation practice can conserve water while reducing CH emissions through the deliberate, periodic introduction of aerobic soil conditions. This paper is the first to measure the impact of AWD on rice field CH emissions using the eddy covariance (EC) method.

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Previous reviews have quantified factors affecting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Asian rice ( L.) systems, but not from rice systems typical for the United States, which often vary considerably particularly in practices (i.e.

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