Former Summer Fellow Radost Stanimirova Authors Paper on Sensitivity of Global Pasturelands to Climate Change

Radost Stanimirova, a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth & Environment and a 2016 Graduate Summer Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently authored a paper titled “Sensitivity of Global Pasturelands to Climate Variation” published in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Earth’s Future.

Pastures are the most extensive use of land on the planet and support livestock production that provide essential food security in many parts of the world. In the paper, Stanimirova uses data on vegetation productivity, rainfall, and land use to determine the response of pastures to climate disruptions. She finds that pastures in Australia are least resistant to precipitation anomalies while those in Latin America recover most slowly after droughts. With climate change expected to decrease total precipitation and increase precipitation variability in arid regions of the world, this research can help inform sustainable pasture management.

The paper, which serves as the first chapter of Stanimirova’s dissertation, stems from the paper she wrote as a Pardee Center Graduate Summer Fellow, in which she developed a modeling framework using remote sensing, meteorological data, and land cover information to monitor responses of global pasturelands to climate variability.