Land Pools & Conversion

1. Land Pools & Conversion Near-term: • Update the GTAP land cover database • Reduce the area of inaccessible forest • Update area of ecosystem types using satellite-based land cover map

2. Land Pools & Conversion Short-term: • Identify rough-cut conversion probabilities for ecosystem types • Consider developing regional look-up-tables or modifiers that can help adjust CET function results and account for critical non-economic factors in specific regions • Estimate the proportion of total cropland that is idle / fallow / abandoned for each region

3. Land Pools & Conversion Long-term: • Investigate methods to improve CET function / land allocation • Refine conversion probabilities for ecosystem types • Add new land pools • Develop estimates forest accessibility for each region

4. Land Cover Types Recommendations – Environmental Quality

5. Near-term Recs • Probably nothing; things to be researched, but nothing “concrete” to add to the modeling effort

6. Short-term Recs • Get a much better definition of what does and what does not constitute 'marginal' acreage with respect to geo-climatic parameters as well as land-based agronomics. • Investigate what needs to be included and what can realistically can be done to really improve the "detail" of the model especially with respect to US production. • Investigate what it would take for GTAP to incorporate environmental quality parameters and land cover types from SSURGO and the NLCD into the internal workings of GTAP.

7. Long-term Recs • Building upon the short-term recommendations, determine how soybeans (and other crops) are accounted for in cropping rotations and moved into other land pools in GTAP and does their movement onto other lands make agronomic sense?

8. Yield and land demandNear term • Adopt exogenous yield assumptions for corn, soy and sugarcane to reflect the relatively small direct land impacts of secular trends in yield improvement for biofuels crops • Similarly, correct the methodology used by GTAP modelers to permit an accounting for background yield changes across agriculture (beyond yields of biofuels crops) • Adopt TEM-based results for estimating AEZ-specific yields for new land brought into agriculture

9. Yield and land demandShort term • Adopt a modeling framework that allows for the dynamic nature of land use change. This could be done using a dynamic version of GTAP • Evaluate alternative approaches to calculating yields on new agricultural lands based on statistical analysis of climate and management factors using updated datasets

10. Yield and land demandLong term • Though more relevant to the alternative modeling subgroup work, we want to emphasize the need for new dynamic approaches to modeling land use change that capture not only dynamic aspects of yield, but the broader non-economic aspects of land use change