Biology subjects

Delandmeter, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Delandmeter, M..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Reconnecting food production and consumption through redesigning food systems to support healthy diets

Balancing the social and environmental costs of food production with the needs of future populations in the face of climate change is the greatest challenge that agriculture is facing in the 21st century. The modification of eating habits towards more environmentally friendly and healthy diets is a key lever to meet this challenge. In 2019, the EAT-Lancet commission defined a universal guideline diet that should allow 9 billion people across the globe to eat healthily while respecting planetary boundaries. In an attempt to reconnect cropping systems to such diets, we developed an innovative approach and designed a decision-making model to assist in the planning and optimization of cropping systems. This model evaluates their ability to supply a specific food system in accordance with the diet recommended by the EAT-Lancet Commission, while comparing vegan, ovo-lacto vegetarian, and omnivorous diets and minimizing the import and export of commodities. Results show that longer and more diverse crop rotations are more likely to comply with the EAT-Lancet dietary requirements, especially if grazing animals are integrated within rotations. Integrated crop-livestock systems including temporary pasture and forage cover crops minimize the excess and deficit of all commodities (food and feed supplies), while reaching the required amount of daily calories and meeting the requirements in each food category. Crop rotations typically need to include rapeseed to provide oil for human consumption and oilseed meals for livestock, as well as a legume crop for pulses and several cereals. The model allows testing a wider range of dietary recommendations or assessing the impact of specific agro-ecological practices. It supports the design of multi-objective crop rotations aligned with dietary guidelines. By reconnecting food production and consumption following a healthy diet, the model provides practical solutions to sustain all three pillars of sustainability for future food systems.

plant biology↗

bioRxiv2025

A Multi-Model Ensemble Reveals Soil Carbon Gains from Regenerative Practices in the U.S. Midwest Cropland

Process-based cropping systems models (CSMs) are key components of measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) frameworks of carbon markets, but their application suffers from model-specific differences that keep any one model from working well across all combinations of soils, climates, crops, and agronomic practices at varying scales. Multi-model ensemble (MME), successfully used to quantify soil, management and climate impact on crop productivity, provide an opportunity to better estimate changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) outcomes for agronomic practices that have the potential to mitigate SOC loss at scale. We used an MME across 46 million hectares of US Midwest cropland at a resolution of 4- km2 to assess the aggregate ability of different regenerative practices to sequester SOC at this scale compared to their dynamic baselines. MME was validated with long-term experimental data and compared to its constituent CSMs, showing greater accuracy and lower uncertainty. The results show that adopting no-till combined with cover crops increased SOC stocks by 0.36 {+/-} 0.12 Mg ha-1 yr-1 aggregated across the entire U.S. Midwest cropland. At the regional scale, this corresponds to a net SOC gain of 16.4 Tg C yr-1 compared to business-as-usual baselines. These benefits are approximately halved when each management change is practiced individually, and the modest gains are only fully realized when continued over the long-term in soils with low initial carbon stock. Results demonstrate the power of MMEs run at high resolution for providing robust estimates of environmental outcomes following agricultural practice change, and for pinpointing locations for most effective intervention. This approach can alleviate many producer carbon market participation barriers and help address market issues while ultimately supporting large-scale regenerative agriculture initiatives.

ecology↗