We had our kickoff workshop in March for our Environmental Institute Grant-Funded Project Promoting Climate-Resilient Agriculture Through Ecosystem Management in Virginia. The 3-year project seeks to center UVA’s Morven Sustainably Lab (MSL), a 3,000 acre working farm, as an experimental and demonstration landscape for landuse transitions in the state of Virginia. The interdisciplinary grant is co-led by University of Virginia Environmental Science Assistant Professors Meghan Blumstein (PI of the BUDS lab) and Fred Cheng, and supported by Co-PIs Michael Luegering (UVA Landscape Architecture) and Zoe Bergman (Virginia Dept. of Forestry).
Our workshop started with a panel (pictured above) with experts who discussed the regional context of landuse management and transitions in the state (Dana Melby - Piedmont Environmental Council, Judy Dunscomb - The Nature Conservancy, Justin Proctor - Smithsonian’s Virginia Working Landscapes, Zoe Bergman - Department of Forestry, Irvin White - Cattle Farmer Bracketts Farm).
We then convened small round-table discussions to ensure all stakeholder voices were herd, discussing topics of emerging technologies, challenges, and concerns for the future.
We then took to the outdoors to tour the property and give people a firsthand look at what MSL has to offer in terms of research, demonstration, and outreach opportunities as well as the challenges we face with transitioning a landscape to new uses that has been in corn/soy rotation or loblolly pine plantation for decades.
We finally wrapped up the day with further round-table discussions to follow up on ideas generated in the field. We are now prepared to start our first field season at MSL and start implementing some of the ideas generated in the workshop as well as gather data needed for the next phase of the project.
We are very excited at the onset of this project and have already started to have smaller group follow-ups with stakeholders on specific ideas! Our goal is to continue to co-generate ideas and experimental plans through regular discussions. Our next we aim to have near the end of the summer, where we will report out our activities and get feedback for the next phase!