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Associate Professor - Environmental Studies

New York University

 Full CV  |  sps246@nyu.edu  |  212.992.7469 

I am a climate scientist and Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU. My research explores the role of landscapes in our regional and global climate systems. In particular, I focus on agriculture as both a driver of global environmental change and vulnerable to it. Global agriculture must feed >9 billion people by 2050 without exceeding a “safe operating space” within the ecosystems that support it. Climate change, partly driven by agriculture itself, further complicates this endeavor. I use a variety of tools in my research, including process-based climate models, crop models, and a range of observational and remote-sensing datasets. I am also a research affiliate at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), where I help develop the land surface component of the NASA GISS ModelE climate model for improved agricultural representation. I have also been recently awarded Fulbright-Kalam Fellowship (2020) and an Andrew Carnegie Scholar Fellowship (2021) to study modes for climate-smart rice production. During the past 10 years, I served as the Climate Co-Lead for the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (www.agmip.org), a UKAID project investigating the impact of climate change on food security across South Asia and Africa. I hold a B.A. in Physics from NYU (2006), and an M.A. (2008), M.Phil. (2011), and Ph.D. (2012) from the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, specializing in Atmospheric and Climate Science. Prior to my appointment NYU, I was NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA GISS in NYC.

 
 

Overview of research interest

My research focuses on understanding interactions and feedbacks between regional and global climates, climate change, and agricultural land and resource use. To understand these interactions, I utilize a variety of tools and datasets, including global climate models, emerging agricultural landuse data products, and process-based crop models. With my global network of interdisciplinary collaborators, I have undertaken numerous climate-agroecosystem studies that range from quantifying the effects of agricultural land management on regional climate systems to bracketing climate change impacts on small-holder livelihoods. While my work is situated in a global context, I maintain a particular emphasis on the semi-arid tropics -- a vast, highly-populated and rapidly-developing domain that is acutely vulnerable to global environmental change.

My projects are generally grouped by the following core questions:

1) How does agricultural land management disturb regional climates and natural ecosystems to drive environmental change?

2) How does climate change impact agricultural production, particularly in vulnerable regions?

3) How can we grow nutritious food that is resilient to change and non-disruptive to regional and global environments?

Below are highlights from some of my major projects. For a full list of references, see my CV linked above.

How does agricultural land management disturb regional climates and natural ecosystems to drive environmental change?

Much of my on this question has utilized the ModelE global climate model from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where I am affiliated as a Science Collaborator. ModelE is a state-of-the-art climate model contributing to major model intercomparison that inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports. I use ModelE to understand and quantify the role of agricultural land use and management on the global and regional climates, particularly in regions of intensive production. To do this, I contribute to ModelE development by improving the representation of agriculture, by way of including improved crop functional types, cropping cycles and calendars, soil hydraulics for global agricultural soils, and testing and using the time-varying irrigation scheme.

I also actively use a variety of observational products and models to better resolve and understand key land-atmosphere feedbacks from both agricultural and natural ecosystems.

Selected Publications and Conference Papers:

McDermid, S.S., I. Aleinov, B. I. Cook, M. J. Puma, T. Hengl, J. Sanderman, and E. Weng. The role of soil carbon loss in amplifying drought (in prep)

†Huang, Ningyuan (Teresa), Pinki Mondal, Benjamin I. Cook, and Sonali McDermid*. (2021) Moisture and temperature influences on nonlinear vegetation trends in Serengeti National Park. Environmental Research Letters. doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac1a37 *Corresponding author, †Student author

McDermid, S.S., Benjamin I. Cook, Martin DeKauwe, Justin Mankin, Jason Smerdon, A. Park Williams, Richard Seager, Michael Puma, Igor Aleinov, Max Kelley, and Larissa Nazarenko. (2021) Disentangling the regional climate impacts of competing vegetation responses to elevated [CO2]. JGR Atmospheres 126: 5, doi:10.1029/2020JD034108

Akihiko Ito, Tomohiro Hajima , David M. Lawrence, Vivek K. Arora,  Victor Brovkin, Bertrand Guenet, Chris D. Jones, Sonali S. McDermid, Daniele Peano, Julia Pongratz, Eddy Robertson, Nicolas Vuichard, David Wårlind, Andy Wiltshire. (2020) Soil carbon sequestration simulated in CMIP6-LUMIP models: implications for climatic mitigation. Environmental Research Letters 15: 124061 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abc912

Cook, Benjamin, I., Sonali S. McDermid, Michael Puma, A. Park Williams, Richard Seager, Maxwell Kelley, and Larissa Nazarenko. (2020) Regional climate benefits of maintaining current irrigation rates. JGR Atmospheres. doi: 10.1029/2019JD031814

Mondal P., S.P. McDermid, and Md. Abdul Qadir Khan. (2020) A reporting framework for Sustainable Development Goal 15: Multiscale monitoring of forest degradation using MODIS, Landsat and Sentinel Data. Remote Sensing of Environment, (237) 111592. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111592

McDermid S.P. (2019) “The hydroclimate impacts of human-induced soil degradation”. Poster 423, 33rd Conference on Hydrology, American Meteorological Society 99thAnnual Meeting, January 6-10, Phoenix, AZ

Gensuo J., Shevliakova, E., Artaxo P., De Noblet-Ducoudré, N., Houghton R., House J., Kaoru K., Lennard C., Popp A., Sirin A., Sukumar R., Verchot L., Anderegg W., Armstrong E., Cherubini F., Davin E., De Kelin C., Grassi G., Hamdi R., Kanter D., Krinner G., McDermid S., Peñuelas J., Roe S., Slot M., Sommer R., Sulman B., Williamson P., Zhou Y. (2019) Chapter 2: Land-Climate Interactions, in IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land, (in press, but publicly available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl-report-download-page/)

McDermid, S.P., C. Montes, B. Cook, M. Puma, N. Kiang, I. Aleinov (2018) The sensitivity of land-atmosphere coupling to modern agriculture in the northern mid-latitudes. J of Climate, doi: https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0799.1

 Singh D.*, S.P. McDermid*, B.I. Cook, M.J. Puma, L.S. Nazarenko, M. Kelley (2018), Distinct influences of land-cover and land-management on seasonal climate. JGR Atmospheres. doi: 10.1029/2018JD028874 * indicates equal contribution by authors

McDermid S.S., L.O. Mearns, and A.C. Ruane (2017) Representing agricultural landuse and management in Earth System Models: approaches and priorities for development. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. doi: 10.1002/2016MS000749

McDermid S.P. and J. Winter. (2017) Anthropogenic Forcings on the Climate of the Aral Sea: A Regional Modeling Perspective. Anthropocene. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2017.03.003

Shukla, S.P., M. J. Puma and B. Cook (2014) The Response of the South Asian Summer Monsoon Circulation to Intensified Irrigation in Global Climate Model Simulations. Climate Dynamics. doi:10.1007/s00382-013-1786-9

How does climate change impact agricultural production, particularly in vulnerable regions?

AgMIP: I have explored this question in large part through the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP, www.agmip.org), in which I served as a Resource Person and Climate Co-Lead from 2012-2018. I co-developed tailored climate information and scenarios for our Regional Integrated Assessments of the impact of climate change on food production and security. These current and future climate data were developed for 10 sites across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and were used to project the changes to crop production and household socio-economic indicators for a population of diversified farming systems. In addition, we worked to conduct some of the first multi-crop model intercomparisons globally and across our regional sites in order to bracket key uncertainties in climate-crop projections. We are currently making our results available at the AgMIP Impacts Explorer: https://agmip-ie.alterra.wur.nl/

Growing Convergence: With an NSF Growing Convergence Research grant and researchers at Columbia University, we are studying climate change, food security, and human migration, particularly from and within West Africa. We hope to conceptually and quantitatively model the intersection of these rapidly changing spaces using transdisciplinary approaches that comprehensively represent and consider key regional drivers and underlying characteristics.

Selected Publications and Conference Papers:

Connor Reed, Weston Anderson*, Andrew Kruczkiewicz, Jennifer Nakamura, Richard Seager, and Sonali Shukla McDermid*. The impact of flooding on food security across Sub-Saharan Africa. (in prep) *Corresponding author, †Student author

Anderson, W. C. Taylor, S. McDermid, W. Schlenker, R. Seager, E. Nebie, F. Cottier, A. deSherbinin, D. Mendeloff, and K. Markey. (2021) Violent conflict exacerbated drought-related food insecurity between 2009 and 2019 in sub-Saharan Africa. Nature Food, 2: 603–615, doi: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00327-4

Mohanty, M., Nishant K. Sinha, J. Somasundaram, Sonali S. McDermid, Ashok. K. Patra, Muneshwar Singh, A. K. Dwivedi, K. Sammi Reddy, Ch. Srinivas Rao, M. Prabhakar, Rohit Patidar, K. M. Hati, R. K. Singh, R.S. Chaudhary, Soora Naresh Kumar, Prabhat Tripathi, Ram C. Dalal, Don S. Gaydon, S. K. Chaudhari. (2020) Soil carbon sequestration potential in a Vertisol in central India - results from a 43-year long-term experiment and APSIM modelling. Agricultural Systems, 184:102906, doi: 10.1016/j.agsy.2020.102906

Kanter, D. R., A. R. Bell, S. S. McDermid (2019). Precision Agriculture for Smallholder Nitrogen Management. OneEarth, 1(3), 281–284. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.10.015

McDermid, S.P., Ruane, A.C., Rosenzweig, C., 2015. The AgMIP Coordinated Climate-Crop Modeling Project ( C3MP ): Methods and Protocols, in: Rosenzweig, C., Hillel, D. (Eds.), Handbook of Climate Change and Agroecosystems: The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (Agmip) Integrated Crop and Economic Assessments. Imperial College Press, London, pp. 191–220. https://doi.org/10.1142/p970#t=toc

Ruane, A.C., McDermid, S., Rosenzweig, C., Baigorria, G. a., Jones, J.W., Romero, C.C., Dewayne Cecil, L., 2014. Carbon-temperature-water change analysis for peanut production under climate change: A prototype for the AgMIP coordinated climate-crop modeling project (C3MP). Glob. Chang. Biol. 20, 394–407. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12412

McDermid, S., Gowtham, R., Bhuvaneswari, K., Vellingiri, G., Arunachalam, L., 2016. The impacts of climate change on Tamil Nadu rainfed maize production : a multi-model approach to identify sensitivities and uncertainties. Curr. Sci. 110.

McDermid, S.P., M. Mohanty, P. Mondal, N. Sinha, D. Arif, and G. Maskell. Evaluating yield sensitivity, soil carbon, and nitrogen loss for alternative cropping systems in Madhya Pradesh, India. (in prep for Environmental Research Letters, Fall 2019)

How can we grow nutritious food that is resilient to change and non-disruptive to regional and global environments?

Embedded in this question is the notion of tradeoffs: given the prevailing globalized systems, what is compromised as we pursue industrialized food trends for all, and who is impacted by pursuing urgent environmental preservation goals? The impacts of these tradeoffs are also subject to how we define “food security” and what set of collective values we harbor while pursuing agricultural development alongside our environmental goals. Furthermore, achieving sustainability in agriculture and food systems will require that we critically evaluate (and re-evaluate) our goals for global agriculture, and consider novel forms of accountability and responsibility.

Alternative Production Systems: I have received a Fulbright-Kalam Scholar Fellowship (2020) and an Andrew Carnegie Scholars Fellowship (2021) to evaluate trade-offs between production gains, social welfare, and environmental sustainability of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). SRI is a set of management principles aimed at producing more rice with fewer natural resources. For this project, I collaborate closely with researchers at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Oregon State University, and International Institution for Cooperation on Agriculture in Costa Rica. We have recently completed factorial field trials to disentangle the relative contributions of these principles, and will use this data to conduct an AgMIP integrated assessment of SRI in southern India and across sites in Latin America and Vietnam.

Selected Publications and Conference Papers:

†Bollington, Alexander, Marcia DeLonge, Dhara Mungra, Matthew Hayek, Mustafa Saifuddin, Sonali P. McDermid*. Closing Investment Gaps for a Global Food Transformation. *Corresponding author, †Student author

McDermid, S.S., R. Mahmood, M. Hayes, J. E. Bell, Z. Lieberman. (2021) Minimizing trade-Offs for sustainable irrigation. Nature Geoscience (accepted, forthcoming)

†Lazarus, O., S. McDermid, and J. Jacquet. (2021) The Climate Responsibilities of Industrial Meat and Dairy Producers. Climatic Change 165: 30, doi: 10.1007/s10584-021-03047-7 †Student author

Collaborators

NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

My work here centers on helping to develop, test, and apply the GISS ModelE global climate model, specifically for problems related to altered surface (terrestrial and ocean) conditions and their interactions with regional and global atmospheric circulation. My recent work has focused on evaluating the regional and global climate impacts of agricultural land management, particularly across South Asia.

Columbia University

I work with researchers within the Earth Institute to combine remote-sensing (and other) analyses with modeling techniques to evaluate the resilience of varied agro-ecosystems in the face of global environmental change. My current projects bring these assessments to Madhya Pradesh, India, where we are working with a local NGO to understand regional farmer decision making and potential adaptation strategies.

I have served as the UKAID-funded AgMIP Climate Co-Lead, and Research Resource Person for our South Asian regional research assessment of the impact of climate change on small-holder farming systems. My work focuses on southern India, but I have also worked with our teams spanning South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. I also co-lead initial development of the Coordinated Climate-Crop Modeling Project (C3MP), which is engaging the global community of crop modelers to contribute experiments evaluating the sensitivity of many crops and models to changes in Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Temperature, and Water. Currently, I am co-leading a new AgMIP integrated assessment of the System of Rice Intensification in Tamil Nadu, India.

Additional Collaborators and Connections

Teaching

In 2018, I received NYU’s Golden Dozen Teaching Award

ENVST-UA 226.001 Climate Change*

ENVST-UA 331.001 Food Production and Climate Change*

ENVST-UA 310.001 Environmental Quantitative Methods*

ENVST-UA 300.001 Climate and Life (forthcoming)*

ENVST-UA 100.001 Environmental System Science

*Courses I have designed/developed
 

For more information on majoring in Environmental Studies, please visit Undergraduate Program of Study on our departmental webpage.

Other Activities

Climate and the arts

Superhero Clubhouse - Eco-theater to enact climate and environmental justice, cultivate hope, and inspire a thriving future. I have served as a Core Member since 2019.

Jump!Star Art Initiative - Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant and organizational partners in several cities, Jump!Star been hosting a series of themed dream-storming sessions called “Constellates,” which focus on the changing North Star as a way to engage in thinking deeply about the future and creating cultural customs (songs, dances, food, regalia, ritual objects) to welcome it. I have served as a consulting scientist on climate and agriculture: https://www.jumpstar.love/satellites.

The Arctic Cycle - The Arctic Cycle uses storytelling and live performance to foster dialogue about our global climate crisis, create an empowering vision of the future, and inspire people to take action. I have participated and given guest lectures in Arctic Cycle incubators and partner initiatives: https://www.thearcticcycle.org/incubator-nyc

The Green Rooms - NAC English Theatre in partnership with many others brought together participants for an extraordinary three-day/three-country digital experiment that reflected on the future of theatre. The Green Rooms were fueled with spirited conversations with leaders in fields such as climate activism, ecological economy and environmental humanities, as well as with theatre artists and leaders who have found innovative ways to engage with the climate crisis. I served on the Curatorial Team.

Useful links

  FCRN  |  CCAFS  |  GrowNYC  |  NASA GISS  |  Climate Central  |  RealClimate  |  AgMIP  | TOA-MD