The Dashboard for Agricultural Water Use and Nutrient Management (DAWN) launched its website today. This marks the latest development of the UMD led project to provide farmers and water managers across the Corn Belt with the most relevant and reliable information for farm-level decision-making.
“The DAWN website presents developing dashboard technology to our users and highlights how this new system will change the way that agricultural stakeholders gather essential data,” said the project’s lead investigator Xin-Zhong Liang, a professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at UMD with a joint appointment in the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC). “Our team is working directly with Midwestern farmers and water managers to ensure that DAWN provides our users with tailored and, more importantly, the most accurate information for decision-support.”
DAWN was established in September 2020 and is a five-year, $10 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. DAWN is based on modeling infrastructure that provides near-term coupled system forecasts at finer resolutions and higher accuracies than have previously been available, capturing key climate and crop interactions across the U.S. agricultural heartland. The system will give farmers and water managers access to those forecasts and to decision support tools that allow users to simulate critical agricultural variables such as crop growth, water stress, and nutrient runoff under different management scenarios.
The DAWN website can be accessed at: https://dawn.umd.edu/. “Launching the website is one of many steps that we are taking to actively engage with our agricultural stakeholders to build a community that’s focused on using the dashboard to generate real-time outlooks,” said Liang.
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DAWN works with a consortium of researchers, extension specialists, educators and stakeholders to fulfill its mission. DAWN partners include researchers at Colorado State University, the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, the University of Nebraska and FamilyFarms Group.
Media Relations Contact: Drew Gower dbgower@umd.edu
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The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 9,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college’s 10 departments and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research centers foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $200 million.
