News Release

October 5, 2020 – The American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America will host the Translating Visionary Science to Practice ASA, CSSA, SSSA International Annual Meeting on a virtual, online platform. The meeting will be held Nov. 9-13, 2020; media are invited.

Lectureships for this all-virtual meeting will be held live and will be viewable to registrants, including media. They will also be available on-demand for 90 days.

Nora Lapitan, Bureau for Resilience and Food Security at USAID, will present the Betty Klepper Endowed Lectureship. The title of her talk is "The Crucial Role of Crop Science in Ending Hunger and Poverty.” Dr. Lapitan will present examples of USAID projects that have successfully translated science into practice to achieve food and nutritional security.

Jayne Belnap will present the Nyle Brady Frontiers of Soil Science Lectureship. She will talk about “The Philosophy, and Nuts & Bolts, of Translating Visionary Science into Action.” “The first step [in being visionary] is to convince people that your vision is a correct one, with long-term benefits.” Dr. Belnap works with the United States Geological Service.

The E.T. Vam York Distinguished ASA Lectureship will be presented by Deanna Osmond. Dr. Osmond will present “It Takes a Village: The Importance of Working Together.” She will describe the FRST program: Fertilizer Recommendation Support Tool – which involves 70 researchers across the country. “We expect the sum will be far greater than the parts and enable us to translate our science into practice at a previously unrealized scale.” She works at North Carolina State University.

"Advancing Understanding of Soil Organic Matter to Transform Challenges into Opportunities" is the topic of Dr. Francesca Cotrufo’s Francis E. Clark Distinguished Lectureship on Soil Biology. Research about “soil organic matter has transformed our understanding of how [it} forms and persists,” says Cotrufo. She will summarize her work on integrated measurement-modeling work under a variety of conditions to determine the capacity of several management practices to regenerate ecosystems. She works at Colorado State University.

Andrew Leakey, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will present “Phenomics of Stomata and Water Use Efficiency in C₄ Crops.” This lecture is part of the Martin and Ruth Massengale Lectureship series. “Water use efficiency…is a key target for improving crop productivity, resilience and sustainability,” says Leakey. He will describe two new phenotyping platforms developed to research stomata in plant leaves. One is an optical tomographer, generating a quantitative measurement of a patch of the leaf surface. The other is thermal imaging to rapidly screen the kinetics of stomatal closure in response to light.

The William Patrick, Jr. Memorial Lectureship will be presented by Scott Bridgham, University of Oregon. The title is "Novel Microbial Pathways Determine Methane Response to Climate Change in Northern Peatlands." Peatlands store about half of the world’s soil carbon – and their warming is a significant source of methane emissions. He will present findings from his research that will provide evidence to predict how climate change will affect the carbon dioxide-methane ratio.

"Reducing Theory to Practice and Practice to Impact" will be presented by P. Stephen Baenziger, University of Nebraska. This talk is part of the Ron Phillips Plant Genetics Lectureship series. The tools underpinning plant breeding and genetic improvement continue to expand and provide great opportunities to change the way plant breeders do their work.

The Calvin Sperling Memorial Biodiversity Lectureship will be presented by Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, University of California, Davis. He will talk about “The Two Teosintes that Made Maize." Careful genetic and archaeological work revealed that maize was domesticated from Mexico. Yet, confusion about the exact parents remained. Dr. Ross-Ibarra will discuss his research into adaptive introgression to determine the heritage of this world-wide crop.

"Soil Fertility Across Space and Time" is the topic of the Leo M. Walsh Soil Fertility Distinguished Lectureship. It will be presented by Richard Ferguson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Ferguson will focus on case studies addressing soil variation in space and across time, comparing and contrasting soil variation in the Great Plains of the US to that of East Africa. He will also explore how management in relatively short time periods can influence crop productivity and environmental quality, and how emerging technologies of crop sensing can be relevant to smallholder farmers of Africa as well as large-scale producers of the US.

Thomas DeLuca, Oregon State will present the Sergei A. Wilde Distinguished Lectureship on Forest Soils. The topic will be "Wilde-Fire: Forest Soils, Fire and Resilience in a Changing Climate." He will focus on the role of fire in shaping forest soil composition and function and how climate change induced shifts in fire regimes threaten ecosystem resilience. “Forest management strategies that incorporate prescribed fire can improve ecosystem resilience while generating pyrogenic carbon and enhancing biological nitrogen fixation. Integrated, systems-based approaches to land management will create resilience to shifting disturbance regimes.”

These distinguished lectureships are supported by endowments through the Agronomic Science Foundation.

For more information about the Translating Visionary Science to Practice meeting, visit https://www.acsmeetings.org/. Media are invited to attend the conference. Pre-registration by Nov. 2, 2020 is required. Visit https://www.acsmeetings.org/media for registration information.

To speak with one of the scientists, contact Susan V. Fisk, 608-273-8091, sfisk@sciencesocieties.org to arrange an interview.