Keynotes & lectureship speakers

Katharine Hayhoe

Keynote speaker

Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on understanding the impacts of climate change on people and the planet. She is the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy and a Horn Distinguished Professor and Endowed Professor of Public Policy and Public Law at Texas Tech University. She has served as a lead author for the Second, Third, and Fourth U.S. National Climate Assessments and her work has resulted in over 125 peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, and other publications. She is the author of the best-selling book Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. She also hosts the PBS Digital Series Global Weirding and is a co-founder of Science Moms.

Hayhoe is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Scientific Affiliation, an Honourary Fellow of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, an Oxfam Sister of the Planet, and the World Evangelical Alliance’s Climate Ambassador. She has been named to lists including the TIME 100 Most Influential People and Fortune's 50 World's Greatest Leaders, received a number of awards including the National Center for Science Education’s Friend of the Planet Award, the American Geophysical Union’s Climate Communication Prize and Ambassador Award, and the Sierra Club’s Distinguished Service Award, and is a United Nations Champion of the Earth in Science and Innovation.

Pamela Ronald

UC Davis

Francesca Cotrufo

Colorado State University

Jerry Hatfield

USDA-ARS (retired)

Kelly Wrighton

Colorado State University

"Advancing Agricultural Sustainability with Soil Biological Metrics: Perspectives from Research in Challenging Environments"

Advances in agriculture rely on a deeper understanding of soil biology and the biological functions that support resilient agroecosystems. Many agricultural regions face increasing challenges to productivity and sustainability, including depleted soil organic matter, water scarcity, and other environmental limitations. Biological indicators of soil health can provide valuable insights for these regions by revealing management effects associated with improved nutrient cycling, soil organic matter, water conservation and drought recovery. This lecture will highlight 25 years of research from the Great Plains region evaluating the belowground effects of various management practices including forage-livestock systems, dryland cropping, cover crops, conservation tillage, and the Conservation Reserve Program on soil microbial communities and processes they regulate under harsh environmental conditions and water shortages. The development and validation of methods to assess soil health will be discussed, including measuring multiple enzymes as a single biogeochemical functional index and using fatty acid-based approaches to assess compositional changes. Additionally, the lecture will emphasize how establishing baselines for biological indicators under multiple environments and management systems is crucial for shaping soil health assessments and guiding the development of future tools and recommendations, helping to rewrite the future of agronomy.

"Building Soil Carbon and Cropping Systems Resilience in an Increasingly Water-scarce World"

Arid and semi-arid regions cover one third of our globe and are home to more than 2 billion people. Agriculture practiced in these regions can provide both cautionary tales and innovative strategies for an increasingly thirsty world. Soil conservation is critical to the resilience of semi-arid cropping systems and soil carbon is the backbone of building healthy soils, yet its accumulation is tightly constrained by water availability. Adapting soil health principles to water-limited landscapes has catalyzed farmer-led experimentation, peer learning networks, and diverse management approaches. Drawing on lessons learned from the high and dry Great Plains, this lecture will: (1) examine the biophysical constraints and tradeoffs governing soil carbon dynamics under water scarcity; (2) highlight producer-driven innovations that navigate trade-offs between short-term profitability and long-term soil stewardship; and (3) explore emerging opportunities to design resilient agroecosystems. Together, these perspectives provide critical insights for other regions facing intensifying drought and climate variability and the need for collaborative approaches to sustain farmer livelihoods while rebuilding soil function in water-limited environments.

"Nitrogen Smart (NNI): a Crop Eco-Physiology Foundation for Scalable Farming Solutions"

Understanding the nitrogen (N) nutrition of major field crops is paramount to advancing food security around the world. The framework of N dilution and the determination of the N nutrition index (NNI) is crucial to improve the effective use of N to reduce the environmental nutrient footprint and improve its management. The overall aim of this presentation is to discuss this re-evaluation of the crop nutrition approach using the NNI concept. To establish NNI as a metric for defining plant N nutritional status and to discuss an extension of this metric to include the interaction of other nutrients and stresses (e.g. water, P and K). Recent advances in the use of NNI as an effective diagnostic tool will be discussed, examining its universality (or otherwise) within and across species. Crop improvement strategies targeting yield gains through N enhancement are explored across maize, wheat, barley, and sorghum, benchmarking changes in nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) using NNI. Finally, the presentation addresses scaling NNI from field to regional levels for monitoring crop N status and quality — forging new frontiers in precision nutrition management and for scalable quantification of N footprint in our agricultural systems.

"Reconnecting Rivers with Coastal Wetlands: Implications for Soil Properties and C, N and P Biogeochemical Cycles"

For 100+ years, prevailing river flood protection policy has focused on isolation of rivers from the adjoining floodplain, providing new land for agricultural, industrial and human settlement/land use.  Port facilities were also established in these former riparian areas in order to move people and essential goods around the globe.  Isolation of the adjacent riparian wetlands from the river has serious negative implications for hydrology, ecology and biogeochemical function of these systems.  Perhaps nowhere on the globe are these impacts more pronounced than in deltaic coastal systems, which experience hydrologic isolation from river levees at the terrestrial margin, and rising sea level at the coastal boundary.  The Mississippi River Delta is one such coastal system where almost a century of river disconnect has led to two large-scale ecological changes.  The first is the conversion of fresh marsh to brackish and salt marsh, as isohalines moved landward.  Secondly, the loss of 5,000 square kilometers of coastal wetlands as sea level rise has led to erosion and submergence, compounding the issue of sediment starvation.  Other river delta wetland systems around the world have suffered a similar fate including the Yangtze and Ebro deltas, with the common thread being reduced sediment supply.  This presentation will focus on wetland soil and biogeochemical changes brought about by river disconnection, driven by a decrease in fresh water, nutrients and sediment.  In addition,  impacts of large-scale restoration efforts in reconnecting the Mississippi River with the coastal basins will be discussed, with implications for increased freshwater flows, high nutrient loads and sediment inputs on wetland soil loss and nutrient biogeochemical function.

"Accelerating Development of Kernza Perennial Grain with Modern Genomic Tools"

Agricultural production of food and fiber is essential to human life as we know it, but annual crop cultivation is a leading driver soil degradation, water scarcity, water contamination and habitat loss. The short-lived nature of annual crops results in substantial periods of each year when soils are devoid of living roots, which increases erosion, nutrient leaching, and weed invasion. Available perennial cropping systems address these challenges but often yield less or no directly human-edible food. Although perennial grain crops have potential to dramatically enhance sustainability, all widely grown grain crops are annual in nature. The feasibility of perennial grain crops has been questioned, with projected breeding timelines stretching to a century or more. Direct domestication of Thinopyrum intermedium to develop Kernza perennial grain has been underway since the 1980s. Now, an excellent reference genome has been developed using long-read sequencing. Utilizing this reference, low-cost skim sequencing plus imputation can generate millions of high-quality genetic markers. Rapid cycling of genomic selection generations enables two breeding cycles per year, six times faster than phenotypic selection. With 12 generations of genomic selection now completed, evidence is growing that directly domesticated perennial grasses can achieve yields similar to annual grains in several decades.

"Triple Gains: A Systems Approach to Nitrogen, Yields, and Sustainability from Field to Food System"

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has driven incredible gains in crop productivity, yet only 12% of applied nitrogen reaches consumers as protein. Today, with a systems-level understanding of soils, plant and animal physiology, manure, synthetic biology, and metagenomics, we can design nitrogen flows for both greater efficiency and lower environmental impact. The Nitrogen 2.0 framework outlines pathways to triple system-level nitrogen use efficiency, increase yields, and cut inputs—by integrating alternative nitrogen sources for livestock, improving manure recycling, and creating cropping systems that retain and reuse more nitrogen on-farm. One example is the Circular Economy that Reimagines Corn Agriculture (CERCA), which focuses on making maize extremely productive and efficient for feed, starch, and fuel uses (60% of the global crop). In temperate climates, maize faces two inefficiencies: it grows poorly in spring when light and nitrogen are available, and it allocates excessive nitrogen to low-value storage proteins in the grain. CERCA addresses this by designing a cold-tolerant maize, shifting nitrogen away from grain protein, and enhancing soil nitrogen recycling and in soil stability through biological nitrification inhibition. Together, these strategies lay the groundwork for a resilient, nitrogen-efficient agricultural system—maximizing productivity while reducing fertilizer input costs and environmental impact.

"Unraveling the Role of Iron Oxides as Traps and Catalysts for Organic Matter Fate in Soils: A Molecular-Scale Journey"

Organic matter associations with minerals in soils and sediments are critical to the residence time of organic matter in environmental matrices,by influencing trapping, turnover, and transport rates. Iron oxyhydroxides and oxides are amongst important mineral types predominantly found in mineral-organic associations. As observed in field and laboratory studies, these associations can involve organic matter of various structures and charges. However, the molecular-scale interactions that drive unexpected binding affinities have remained mostly hypotheses. Through the combination of molecular modeling simulations with multiple spectroscopic data, my team has sought to obtain evidence for different types of proposed interactions. We have performed adsorption experiments of different types of biomolecules (sugars, amino acids, ribonucleotides, lignin-derived phenolic acids) reacted with ferrihydrite, a common iron oxyhydroxide mineral. The interactions at the mineral interfaces are examined through Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. Solution analysis for monitoring organic compound transformation was conducted using high-resolution liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. For three-dimensional views of the organic binding conformations responsible for identified interactions, we have employed molecular dynamics simulations coupled with quantum mechanics-calculated binding energies. Taken collectively, the coupling of experimental and theoretical techniques has afforded new insights on diverse types of organic binding during adsorption of organic matter on iron oxides. These insights contribute to predictive understanding on the role of these minerals in the geochemical fate of organic matter.

"Pervasive Structural Variation in Plants: Implications for Breeding"

In plants, structural variants affect more base pairs than single nucleotide polymorphisms and typically have outsized effects on phenotypic variation. Only recently have genomic tools enabled the detailed study of these variants in wild and domesticated species. I will first discuss how large structural variants, particularly chromosomal inversions, can aid environmental adaptation by suppressing recombination between locally favored mutations. In wild sunflowers, adaptation to extreme habitats such as dunes has been enabled by massive non-recombining “supergenes”. These regions are associated with structural variants and affect ecologically relevant traits, helping resolve a longstanding mystery of how speciation can occur with gene flow. Next, I will shift my focus to how structural variants impact breeding. Structural variants hamper breeding by impeding recombination and introgression and through their effects on hybrid sterility.  In cultivated sunflower, gene presence/absence variation, which affects ~40% of the cultivated sunflower pan genome, is often associated with introgressions from wild species introduced by breeding. In many cases, genes are missing in introgressed regions, partially explaining why such introgressions often are deleterious. However, expression complementation in hybrids can offset these losses and contribute significantly to heterosis. Thus, hybrid production permits the use of beneficial wild alleles without sacrificing productivity.

"From Both Sides of the Fence: Reflections on Industry-Academia Collaboration in Agricultural Research and Education"

Industry soil scientists and agronomists sometimes join efforts in research and education for their common clientele.  Perceptions of the value of these collaborations vary widely. Input manufacturers sometimes use university research and extension programs to provide science-based recommendations to their clientele. University extension and research staff frequently seek input from industry advisory boards and stakeholders. These relationships are sometimes productive, healthy, and truly collaborative, but sometimes they can be adversarial to varying degrees. What role should industry play as a stakeholder in university research and education and developing recommendations for growers? What benefits does industry receive for collaborating in university research? What benefits accrue to academia from industry collaboration? Does collaboration with industry “taint” academic endeavors as being “bought” by industry? This lecture will attempt to highlight some opportunities and challenges in industry-academia collaboration through the lens of almost 40 years’ experience working in both academic and industry collaborative endeavors.

"Impactful Science – Lessons Learned from the Northern Peatland SPRUCE and Agricultural STRIPS Experiments"

I’ve had the pleasure to work on numerous large scale experiments over my career but two in particular, SPRUCE (Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments) and STRIPS (Science-Based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips) have wide-ranging implications for on-the-ground changes through both awareness and policy development.  The results of SPRUCE indicate that climate warming will flip these large carbon stores in the Boreal Zone from being historic sinks to being sources of carbon to the atmosphere. Over the last 10 years of SPRUCE we had 2500+ visitors to the experiment, some of which were Minnesota state officials that recently received a $20 million grant to restore peatlands in northern Minnesota.  Over ~20 years of the STRIPS experiment we have shown massive decreases in sediment and nitrogen transport and increases in habitat suitability for desired species, just by strategically added 10% prairie to agricultural landscapes.  Those results culminated in prairie strips being an approved and supported conservation practice in the 2018 Farm Bill.  Currently there are about 26,000 acres of STRIPS supporting 260,000 acres of protected cropland in 14 states.  Both SPRUCE and STRIPS are contributing to large-scale on-the-ground changes that address both current and future societal needs.