Katherine Nelson
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Plant Science & Agriculture·Early-career
Growing many kinds of crops can make farming regions better able to withstand droughts, price shocks and other stress. Yet many farm regions have narrowed to just a few crops.
- Fields
Plant Science & Agriculture
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
crop diversification
crop diversity
simplification traps
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Identify and describe crop "simplification traps" in U.S. farm regions by applying change-point analysis, which detects when trends shift, to agricultural census and archival data.
- Explore how simplification traps arise from links between farms and rural communities, using statistical inference, interviews and agent-based simulations of interacting farmers.
- Measure how agricultural resilience and pathway diversity, the range of future options open to a farm system, change once simplification traps develop.
More about the research
Once that narrowing starts, it can reinforce itself through markets, equipment and local businesses, making it hard to reverse. This project calls these self-reinforcing patterns "simplification traps" and asks how they form and how they change the resilience of farms and the rural communities tied to them.
Why it matters
Many rural regions are locked into a few crops, which can leave farms and towns vulnerable to environmental and economic shocks. This work could give planners tools to spot and monitor at-risk farming systems. It could also guide crop diversification strategies and interventions that make farms and rural communities more resilient.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Maria Watson
University of Florida, FL·Social Science
Track how farms recover from severe windstorms over time, using repeated field visits to affected agricultural communities and surveys of farmers whose operations were damaged.
Alyssa Paredes
University of Michigan, MI·Social Science
Identify the factors that lead farmers to adopt or reject agricultural biotechnologies, especially genetically modified agriculture, using interviews and observation among farmers, agricultural workers and scientists.
Siddharth Chandra
Michigan State University, MI·Social Science
Infer the hidden structure and flow of cocaine supply networks by applying network analysis to cocaine price data that vary across locations and over time.
The school
University of Missouri-Columbia: 21 labs on PI Pages, $509M a year on research, 260 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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