The UWLandLab—a Place for Ecological Solutions to Land Use Problems

The UWLandLab will be a space where innovative solutions to complex land use challenges are explored, interrogated, and planned. The UWLandLab will build and provide a sustainability process that brings together science-based knowledge, decision-support tools, and innovative stakeholder engagement to help solve problems and make decisions about land use with community partners. Critical to this endeavor, partnerships and trust will be cultivated and nurtured via reciprocal site visits, listening sessions, and collaborative data exploration.

For example, land management solutions to the environmental problems caused by modern agriculture have been well-known for decades, but considerable social, political, and economic resistance has impeded their implementation. How do we configure and incentivize landscapes that produce healthy food, feed, fiber, and fuel while simultaneously helping to purify water, stabilize climate, and enhance biodiversity? Solutions that simultaneously improve all of these criteria exist, but must be explored in a collaborative, collegial manner where tradeoffs and synergies are acknowledged, mitigated, and agreed upon by stakeholders. Using data, models, expertise, and facilitated engagement, the UWLandLab will position itself as a space where people with conflicting world views, goals, and expertise can come together to engage in discussion and design processes that arrive at enduring and effective land-use strategies.

Principal Investigator

• Randy Jackson
  Professor of Agronomy
  

Co-Principal Investigators

• Michael Bell
  Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology
• Claudio Gratton
  Professor of Entomology
• Chris Kucharik
  Professor of Agronomy and Environmental Studies