University of British Columbia

Supervisor – Khanh Dao Duc, Co-supervisor – Hannah Wittman

Collaborators: Organic BC (https://organicbc.org), Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
(AAFC)

Project Description: Agriculture is a major contributor of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, posing a major challenge in the context of climate change. In this context, diversified farming and land
management practices, from crop selection to tillage methods can help mitigate these emissions,
but require reliable quantification and access to practitioners and stakeholders to aid decision
making. In this context, our team has been developing Litefarm (https://www.litefarm.org), a free
and open-source multifunctional web app which can be used by farmers to enter data for farm
management, obtaining organic certification (including in BC), and participatory assessment of
agroecological outputs. Launched in 2020, LiteFarm is now the world’s first community-led, notfor-
profit, digital platform joining farmers and scientists, and is being piloted independently by
over 6000 farmers in more than 150 countries. Our project focuses on enhancing GHG emissions
modeling framework by integrating and improving a mathematical model of GHG developed by
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) (https://agriculture.canada.ca/en/agriculturalproduction/
holos) with comprehensive global data (e.g. soil, climate data) to the Litefarm
database. Our implementation will enable determining how changes in input parameters affect
GHG emission estimates over a large scale, and identify key drivers of GHG emission changes
across different conditions.