Jessica Stephenson
Pronouns
she/her/hers
Position
- Graduate Research Assistant, PhD student
- Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture
Jessica Stephenson is a member of the Tyndall PLUS Lab pursuing a PhD in the Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture (GPSA; https://www.susag.iastate.edu/). Her doctoral research is a part of the Consortium for Cultivating Human and Naturally reGenerative Enterprises (C-CHANGE; https://cchange.research.iastate.edu/) and is centered on studying opportunities for intersecting crop production with perennializing the landscape in Iowa. She is using the Agricultural Conservation Planning Framework (ACPF; https://acpf4watersheds.org/) and companion GIS tools to identify opportunities for increasing continuous cover on the landscape. These tools are being leveraged to integrate a conservation planning approach while establishing a bioeconomic model that supports an anaerobic digester (AD) facility in east central Iowa. The research is primarily applied work that weaves together interdisciplinary research within C-CHANGE and scales it to develop a set of regional land management scenarios prioritizing ecological uplift through perennialization of the landscape using energy feedstocks.
The AD facility co-digests grassy feedstocks with beef manure to generate biofuels. The facility makes payments to farmers that grow and harvest grassy feedstocks, including winter rye crop and native prairie. Using ACPF, we can develop spatially explicit land management scenarios at various supplysheds scales that include harvest of winter rye crop and native prairie in strategic locations to optimize for water quality, greenhouse gas emission reductions, erosion reduction, and wildlife enhancement. In order to model ecosystem service outcomes from these management changes, Jessica is updating foundational datasets to standardize inputs and compare land management scenario outputs.
Her research demonstrates methods to improve the applicability of national and local crop productivity and profitability measures as well as quantification of important ecosystem services that can be used in environmental markets (e.g., Carbon market, water quality market, habitat offsets). Using the Financial and Nutrient Reduction Tool (FiNRT), a companion tool of ACPF, we have conducted cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of converting cropland from corn rotations to include more continuous cover. The cost per unit of ecosystem service provided can be estimated for each change in field management and potentially used as a way to standardize crediting in environmental markets. The costs were estimated for each field and includes direct costs of establishing, managing, and harvesting the grassy feedstock crop and opportunity costs (i.e., change in cash rent values), and the AD facility payment for the feedstock crop is included as the benefit.
Before starting this research, she received her master’s degree at Iowa State University in GPSA. Her thesis research was on in-field soil displacement patterns in a paired treatment study to compare fields with and without strips of native prairie vegetation (https://www.nrem.iastate.edu/research/STRIPS/). She collected soil samples using the mesh pad method to determine patterns of soil movement above, between and below prairie strips and leveraged long-term flume data collected by the Helmers Lab to compare sediment transport to upland soil displacement patterns (https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/entities/publication/1e3e416e-6424-49e7-be95-098926bd1994). This research helped her understand how perennializing cropland with native prairie can impact on-farm management decisions and movement of soil and nutrients within subfield drainage basins.
Jessica has worked at different scales of cropland management from on-farm to HUC8 watersheds through her academic research at Iowa State University and professional work at Water Resources Center, Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN as a Watershed and GIS Outreach Specialist. This range of experience has allowed her to gain a comprehensive view of land management in agricultural watersheds and the dynamic challenges facing farms both agronomically, socially, and environmentally. Her time as a field researcher and community organizer are being incorporated in her doctoral research to improve the applicability of key land management decision-making datasets and tools and demonstrating regional land scenarios that provide payment mechanisms to farmers and landowners for their efforts to generate ecological uplift.
The AD facility co-digests grassy feedstocks with beef manure to generate biofuels. The facility makes payments to farmers that grow and harvest grassy feedstocks, including winter rye crop and native prairie. Using ACPF, we can develop spatially explicit land management scenarios at various supplysheds scales that include harvest of winter rye crop and native prairie in strategic locations to optimize for water quality, greenhouse gas emission reductions, erosion reduction, and wildlife enhancement. In order to model ecosystem service outcomes from these management changes, Jessica is updating foundational datasets to standardize inputs and compare land management scenario outputs.
Her research demonstrates methods to improve the applicability of national and local crop productivity and profitability measures as well as quantification of important ecosystem services that can be used in environmental markets (e.g., Carbon market, water quality market, habitat offsets). Using the Financial and Nutrient Reduction Tool (FiNRT), a companion tool of ACPF, we have conducted cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of converting cropland from corn rotations to include more continuous cover. The cost per unit of ecosystem service provided can be estimated for each change in field management and potentially used as a way to standardize crediting in environmental markets. The costs were estimated for each field and includes direct costs of establishing, managing, and harvesting the grassy feedstock crop and opportunity costs (i.e., change in cash rent values), and the AD facility payment for the feedstock crop is included as the benefit.
Before starting this research, she received her master’s degree at Iowa State University in GPSA. Her thesis research was on in-field soil displacement patterns in a paired treatment study to compare fields with and without strips of native prairie vegetation (https://www.nrem.iastate.edu/research/STRIPS/). She collected soil samples using the mesh pad method to determine patterns of soil movement above, between and below prairie strips and leveraged long-term flume data collected by the Helmers Lab to compare sediment transport to upland soil displacement patterns (https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/entities/publication/1e3e416e-6424-49e7-be95-098926bd1994). This research helped her understand how perennializing cropland with native prairie can impact on-farm management decisions and movement of soil and nutrients within subfield drainage basins.
Jessica has worked at different scales of cropland management from on-farm to HUC8 watersheds through her academic research at Iowa State University and professional work at Water Resources Center, Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN as a Watershed and GIS Outreach Specialist. This range of experience has allowed her to gain a comprehensive view of land management in agricultural watersheds and the dynamic challenges facing farms both agronomically, socially, and environmentally. Her time as a field researcher and community organizer are being incorporated in her doctoral research to improve the applicability of key land management decision-making datasets and tools and demonstrating regional land scenarios that provide payment mechanisms to farmers and landowners for their efforts to generate ecological uplift.