This seminar is part of the Climate Cookies & Coffee series of the Belgian Climate Centre. This is a new seminar series launched by the Belgian Climate Centre to foster knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and interdisciplinary discussion among climate researchers.
For the second edition, the Belgian Climate Centre will welcome Mathieu Delandmeter (Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech - ULiège) who will talk on: 'Modeling soil-crop-livestock interactions to assess ecosystem services in diverse and integrated crop-livestock systems aimed at adapting to and mitigating climate change'.
Climate change increasingly threatens agricultural systems, while these systems, in turn, contribute to climate change – creating a self-reinforcing cycle. To break this cycle, a range of agroecological strategies are being explored within crop rotation systems. They span from efficiency improvements, such as reducing nitrogen fertilizer use, to substitution methods like no-till, and more transformative redesigns, including the use of cover crops, diversifying crop rotations, and livestock integration. In my PhD research, we used soil-crop models to assess the effectiveness of these strategies at large spatio-temporal scales – covering millions of hectares across Belgium, Brazil, and the US Midwest – under both historical and projected climate conditions. Our evaluation focused on a wide range of ecosystem services, including crop productivity and profitability, soil carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas emissions, and nitrate leaching. We also examined how yields respond to climate change, with particular attention to their stability and resistance during extreme weather events, such as severe droughts and heavy rainfall. In various contexts, we began with conventional scenarios – such as maize monocultures in the US Midwest and cash crop rotations in Wallonia – and progressively introduced ecological intensification strategies to evaluate their impacts, with a special emphasis placed on the potential of integrated crop-livestock systems.
