Increased government investment in climate change mitigation is prompting agricultural sectors to find reliable methods for measuring their contribution to climate change. With that in mind, a team led by scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign proposed a supercomputing solution to help measure individual farm field-level greenhouse gas emissions.

Although locally tested in the Midwest, the new approach can be scaled up to national and global levels and help the industry grasp the best practices for reducing emissions.

The new study, directed by natural resources and environmental sciences professor Kaiyu Guan, synthesized more than 25 of the group's previous studies to quantify greenhouse gas emissions produced by U.S. farmland. The findings—completed in collaboration with partners from the University of Minnesota, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit organization—are published in the journal Earth Science Reviews.