Welcome
I am a natural resource and environmental economist working predominantly on applied research at the interface between agriculture and the environment. The majority of my research is motivated by science-based decision making and public policy, and is interdisciplinary in nature. I have a strong interest in the economics of climate change, ecosystem services, information economics, choice modeling and economic management of spatial-dynamic processes in the environment.
I currently (2020 - ) serve as the Director of Graduate Recruiting & Admissions in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at UIUC. I teach undergraduate environmental economics and graduate natural resource economics.
Published open source data sets for researchers (please cite our DOI if using the data):
2019: Meta-analytic data from agricultural conservation practice adoption research in the United States 1982-2018. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2019-0011
2017: Agro-Climatic Data by County (ACDC), 1981-2015. doi:10.4231/R72F7KK2
R Packages developed by Bowen Chen in the Gramig Lab that may be of interest to agro-environmental researchers:
Use the CropScapeR package to access the USDA's Cropland Data Layer (CDL) data for user-defined areas of interest and calculate crop rotations and land use changes over time
Use the rarms package to access aggregate summary statistics from the USDA Ag Resource Management Survey (ARMS) using their API. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rarms/index.html
Decision Support Tool links for U.S. Corn Belt farmers and farm advisers: