ryan ackett, PhD(!)

BREAKING: The USDA tells states funds will be made available later today to pay November SNAP benefits in full.

It's a classic win win where cows get grass and meadowlarks get something that's not corn or subdivisions, but biodiversity, land, climate (not just methane, but also nitrous oxide) still suffers.

Most of our most ecologically significant "protected" grasslands are in the production game, and they are DYING, at least compared to the few that aren't. But yeah, conventional corn is worse.

Can you even imagine a pre-tomato Italy?! Weird to think that the entire history of the Roman Empire was tomato-free. 🍅 🇮🇹 🚫

a diagram representing 4 factors that are necessary before a plant disease occurs. Three vertices of a triangle are labeled: • a susceptible host (the plant), • the causal agent (pathogen), • a favorable environment for the pathogen, Inside the triangle is a circle labeled "time."

recommendation for people looking to cover up their Deathly Hallows tattoos: some interpretation of the horticultural Disease Triangle

I feel like the newsletter going around might be understating the extent to which the last ~7 years of left climate politics already *was* a pivot to the material needs of working people, and away from a more crunchy 'save the planet' for the planet's own sake.

What made the Green New Deal such an galvanizing frame is that it linked climate policies with people's real material conditions. It suggested you could build a happier, more prosperous life for yourself via greening the economy. What Mamdani has done is just another iteration of that strategy.

we will brand our political enemies as our ignorant foils: Know Nothings. While we are Wide Awake and aware, those who remain sleeping and with their heads in the sand can only seem to utter the same trite phrases, and refuse to engage with our attempts at dialogue.

No matter how hard people try to convince us having empathy is wrong,

it is right.

No matter how hard people try to convince us that diversity is a weakness,

it is a strength.

No matter how hard people try to convince us that love is limited,

it is unlimited.

For years, there's been a massive over-emphasis on food miles, and a massive under-emphasis on food type.
By far and away the best dietary decision you can make, for environmental, humanitarian and public health purposes, is to cut out animal products.

Trump’s Tariffs Should Force a Reckoning With America’s Soy Industry The industry became the world’s second largest not because of human demand for soy, but to feed China’s pigs.

"How much soy we produce shouldn’t be a barometer for how well our agriculture sector is doing, but for how unsustainable it is."

I wrote for @newrepublic.com that the trade war with China shows we grow too many crops to feed not people but factory-farmed animals.
newrepublic.com/article/2014...

Statistical Identification of Nitrous Oxide Hot Moments and Their Significance Across Global Agroecosystems The frequency and magnitude of N2O hot moments within agricultural data sets are highly variable Median absolute deviation and minimum covariance determinant can accurately identify hot moments a...

New pub alert! The biggest source of GHG from crops is not CO2 (like industry) or methane (like animal ag), but nitrous oxide. Emissions aren't constant though- they're usually low but occasionally explode into "hot moments"- the focus of my PhD work agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Statistical Identification of Nitrous Oxide Hot Moments and Their Significance Across Global Agroecosystems The frequency and magnitude of N2O hot moments within agricultural data sets are highly variable Median absolute deviation and minimum covariance determinant can accurately identify hot moments a...

Message me of you'd like access to the full paper! agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

For the first time, this paper provides specificity to the global outsized impact of N2O hot moments, and provides a concrete path toward applying quantitative methods in their investigation. We hope these findings will be a valuable stepping stone toward mitigating N2O from agricultural soils.

The 2nd goal of this paper was of broader interest: just how often to these hot moment events occur, and what is their overall contribution to cropland agriculture's global climate impact? We estimate that hot moments occur about 50 days of the year (14%), but contribute >60% of annual N2O emissions

As data scientists know, having reliable data labels is of the highest importance to building quality models. By using the statistical anomaly detection methods we recommend, researchers will be able to produce accurate data labels for N2O "hot moments" and "background emissions" nearly instantly.

I examined over a dozen statistical methods of "anomaly detection"- mathematical algorithms which categorize data points as either following expected patterns, or anomalies which break trends. I show that because N2O emissions are so variable, you need to use flexible, or "robust" algorithms.

In this first major work from my dissertation, I perform a global synthesis of 42 diverse agricultural datasets. The first goal was: with all of this data, how do we isolate out the emissions periods with high impact, so that we can further model and research what causes them?

Rather than a problem, I conceptualize these hot moments as opportunities: if our goal is to mitigate the greatest amount of GHG emissions with the least amount of effort, then hot moments present us with the perfect target! We could isolate these events, understand their drivers, and predict them.

Statistical Identification of Nitrous Oxide Hot Moments and Their Significance Across Global Agroecosystems The frequency and magnitude of N2O hot moments within agricultural data sets are highly variable Median absolute deviation and minimum covariance determinant can accurately identify hot moments a...

New pub alert! The biggest source of GHG from crops is not CO2 (like industry) or methane (like animal ag), but nitrous oxide. Emissions aren't constant though- they're usually low but occasionally explode into "hot moments"- the focus of my PhD work agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Details not mentioned in this glowing bio: her peddling of vaccine skepticism and autism conspiracies. This is a premier science community, we really need to do better than this.

Why is @agu.org honoring an antiscience conspiracy theorist, including dangerous falsehoods about autism, as the keynote speaker for the largest climate science conference in America? I could not be more disappointed by this decision

Accepted! Look for my first first-author publication, "Statistical identification of nitrous oxide hot moments and their significance across global agroecosystems," coming soon to the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences!

'How citizen science can help to solve the freshwater crisis: How can we monitor freshwater bodies globally and identify pollution hotspots so that we can hold polluters accountable? The answer, I think, is citizen science: the public’s active involvement in research.'
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Who is an American farmer? Who counts in American agriculture? - Agriculture and Human Values Agriculture and Human Values - The most recent changes in the US Census of Agriculture (CoA) have caused substantial increases in the number of farmers. At the same time, by including lifestyle and...

Here's my open access paper "Who is an American farmer? Who counts in American agriculture?"!
I show that using $1,000 sales value as the threshold to be considered a farmer in the Census of Agriculture + increasing the # of operators per farm results in vast overestimates of "farms" & "farmers" 1/

New Research: The Inherent Conflict of Interest in Carbon Markets The allure of “verified” carbon credits is obvious, but new research finds the verification process deeply flawed by the fact that auditors are hired and paid by project developers, creating a financi...

The answer to the many, many stories of shady carbon credits has been verification. Surely if these credits are audited, we can trust them, right? A new study says nope, conflict of interest abounds. @rishpardikar.bsky.social has the story for @drilledmedia.bsky.social drilled.media/news/carbon-...

Trump’s War on Measurement Means Losing Data on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change and More By slashing teams that gather critical data, the administration has left the federal government with no way of understanding if policies are working — and created a black hole of information whose…

In agency after agency, the U.S. government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of policies.

(Published April)

A really thoughtful piece by @lisaelaineh.bsky.social.

MAHA w/o addressing climate change and its ag causes, including confined animal feeding operations & biofuels, is a pathetic fig leaf while extractive ag keeps adding fuel to the fire.

Energy & ag policies need to change to address CC impacts.

momentum limits would actually be rad. always in a hurry? better buy a miata

Thank you!