Generating quality-assessed land-soil-crop information to support climate smart agriculture in Ethiopia

Land, Soil, and Crop Information Services (LSC-IS) to support Climate Smart Agriculture is one of the project under the framework of the European initiative known as Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture (DeSIRA). It has been started since January 2022 in three East African countries including Ethiopia. It is the fact that all data sources for LSC-IS will have different levels of readiness, detail, accuracy, standardization and interoperability. Further, most of the data sources should be used in several modelling frameworks (either process based, empirical or both), such as: derive fertilizer recommendations, compute soil water sufficiency relative to crop water requirements, or monitor soil quality indicators. However, LSC information is often not used effectively in decision-making, because it is not available in an organized and accessible form and is not seen as ‘owned’ by national organizations of Ethiopia. As a result, stakeholders at national and local levels, including smallholder farmers, are not well equipped to evaluate their policies, plans and farming practices and improve and transform these in a climate smart manner. The PhD research project aims to generate quality-assessed Land-Soil-Crop Information to support climate smart agriculture in Ethiopia. It will have four chapters: 1) Identifying and mapping land, soil and crop data for the study area, including uncertainty quantification and including RZ-PAWHC and related soil properties; 2) Set-up and calibrate QUEFTS and WOFOST crop yield models for the study area; 3) Derive fertilizer recommendations from soil fertility status and outputs of QUEFTS and WOFOST; 4) Derive fertilizer recommendations taking the various sources of uncertainty into account.