Virginia Longo

I have a background in Physics and I'm interested in researching how climate change is affecting the water cycle and the consequences of the ongoing drought conditions on vegetation and crops. For this reason, my Master's thesis focused on the impact of climate change on evapotranspiration and the importance of its estimation for water management in agriculture.

I joined the Department of Geography in October 2023, when I started my PhD in Physical Geography.

Engineer crop behaviours to respond to extreme climatic conditions

My PhD project aims to deliver a new understanding of the current drought-sensitive, at-risk agricultural areas of the world, focusing on the increasing risk of compound events, i.e. a combination of two or more climatic events (not necessarily extreme) that can lead to extreme impacts. These events can take place either at the same time or in close succession, but they can also occur concurrently in different regions, affecting the same system. This is the case for multiple breadbasket failures, i.e. synchronous crop failures that affect the main crop producing areas of the world.

Breadbaskets can provide food for a significant proportion of the population at local, regional, national, or global scales, and they can be critical to global commodity trade. Therefore, given the increasing interconnection of the global food system, these simultaneous productivity failures pose a threat both to local and global food security. My project aims to study the influence of the climate system on the spatial dependence of these events, focusing on rain-fed wheat breadbaskets, as well as investigate how climate change will affect their duration and frequency.

The project also aims to simulate large-scale cultivations of drought-tolerant wheat to test its effectiveness under different climatic conditions. In fact, given the current restrictions on the release of gene-edited crops, most of the results come from experiments conducted in controlled environments.

The simulations will be performed with a Dynamic Global Vegetation Model forced with output data of climate models for different emissions scenarios. The results of yields and water use will be compared with those from control wheat (i.e. not gene-edited), to determine if and to what extent drought-tolerant crops can help mitigate the impacts of compound and unprecedented events.

The project is interdisciplinary, encompassing Climate Science and Biosciences, and it will involve working with output data of climate simulations as well as experimental data on drought-tolerant wheat.

Supervisors: Dr Sihan Li, Dr Julie Jones, Prof Julie Gray