ASC Director and Scientist Named Levenick Endowed Professors

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*ACES Levenick Professor* *Kaiyu Guan (left) and Levenick Center Director* *Jeremy Guest (right)*

The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at the University of Illinois has received a $10 million gift from Stuart L. and Nancy J. Levenick to support the creation of the Levenick Center for a Climate-Smart Circular Bioeconomy. In partnership with the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), the center will serve as an interdisciplinary hub for research, education, and cross-sector partnerships in sustainability at the University of Illinois. Two key leaders of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) have been appointed to endowed professorships as parts of the gift. Kaiyu Guan, ASC founding director and professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois will serve as the ACES Levenick Professor. Jeremy Guest, Associate Director for Research at the iSEE and professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will serve as the Levenick Center Director and iSEE Levenick Professor.

Kaiyu Guan, a leading researcher in agroecosystem sensing and modeling, is an expert in using advanced data science and supercomputing to support sustainable food and bioenergy systems. Guan is also the Blue Waters Professor of Supercomputing at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and Chief Scientist of the NASA Acres Consortium, NASA’s flagship program for advancing U.S. Guan is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and recent recipient of their James B. Macelwane Medal. His team recently developed a “system-of-systems” framework to quantify agricultural productivity and environmental impacts at scale and low cost. He has also created tools to help farmers make informed decisions about sustainable practices.

Jeremy Guest is a leading researcher in technologies and systems for conversion of agricultural materials and waste into valuable resources, and the recipient of the James J. Morgan Environmental Science & Technology Early Career Award. Guest noted “The transition from fossil carbon to renewable carbon feedstocks has the potential to support development across the rural-to-urban continuum in the Midwest and broader U.S., helping shift our national trajectory toward a sustainable, safe, and secure bioeconomy.”

Based at iSEE, the new circular bioeconomy center aims to promote recycling and regeneration in agricultural processes. Key initiatives include fostering public-private partnerships to create environmentally and economically beneficial strategies, and launching outreach programs. According to iSEE Director and ACES Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics Madhu Khanna, “This new center and faculty hires will make the University of Illinois an unquestioned leader in research and education on a circular bioeconomy. It will nucleate a campuswide research and education program specifically designated for circular bioeconomy scholarship.”

“The visionary Levenick Center represents an exciting opportunity to draw on existing campus strengths and further develop cross-disciplinary partnerships toward a more sustainable future,” said College of ACES Dean and Robert A. Easter Chair Germán Bollero. “Further, the investments in scholars like Kaiyu Guan and Jeremy Guest, who embody the forefront of innovation in this space, will transform bioeconomies in ways we can’t even imagine.”

The initiative is further strengthened by a university-backed cluster hire of four faculty across multiple departments, enhancing cross-disciplinary collaborations in bioeconomy research. The integrated expertise will guide the Center’s efforts to minimize waste, recycle materials, and repurpose biological resources into food, energy, and biomaterials, creating a circular bioeconomy that supports both communities and ecosystems. “The Levenick Center’s generous support will further advance our research to help the farming industry and the economy as a whole transition to be more sustainable and resilient,” Guan said. “This work builds on the University of Illinois’ mission of transforming lives and serving society by putting knowledge to work with excellence.”

To incentivize farmers to adopt environmentally beneficial practices, carbon credits are awarded to those who demonstrate practices that draw more carbon into the soil from the atmosphere. However, there is currently a lack of confidence that soil organic carbon credits represent real climate benefits. A research project led by Eric Potash and the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center at the University of Illinois, has shown that a more rigorous approach to soil carbon quantification is possible, one which promises to build confidence in credits representing real climate benefits.

Currently the most common approach to quantifying these soil carbon credits is called “measure-and-model.” In this approach a soil carbon project developer will measure the carbon stocks on their farms before they begin changing the practice, then they will run models on a computer to estimate the change over time.

By contrast, in the “measure-and-remeasure” approach studied by Potash and co-authors, developers measure those carbon stocks before the practice and then go back a few years later to remeasure stocks. This empirical approach can provide more reliable quantification of soil carbon accrual. Yet voluntary carbon markets and other carbon accounting approaches, including national-level greenhouse gas accounting, rely primarily on measure-and-model because of an assumption that the direct measurement approach is too expensive at landscape and regional scales.

Potash along with co-authors Mark Bradford from the Yale School of the Environment, Emily Oldfield from the Environmental Defense Fund, and ASC Director Kaiyu Guan show that measure-and-remeasure can be economically feasible for carbon crediting when a project is scaled up. The team has developed a web app, where developers can plug in a number of variables to determine how much it would cost to implement measure-and-remeasure in their projects and how profitable they can be selling carbon credits.

Instead of using biogeochemical modeling as in the measure-and-model approach, Potash and co-authors use a multilevel statistical model to estimate the costs and benefits of measure-and-remeasure. In this approach, the group estimated how much sampling would need to be done under the more rigorous measure-and-remeasure to precisely quantify the overall effect of climate-smart practices across a large number of fields. Prior academic work on soil carbon measurement hasn’t considered projects on the scale of thousands or tens of thousands of fields that occur in the voluntary carbon market.

Prior to this work, there was a perception of an inherent trade-off between rigor and economic feasibility that led most developers to take up the cheaper but less rigorous measure-and-model. In this research, Potash and co-authors have provided a framework that factors in a host of variables (all the costs and all the benefits), and shows that larger projects can be developed under the measure-and-remeasure approach and still be quite profitable. The web app enables users to interactively explore how these variables affect the economics of their specific SOC projects. Small projects can also use the app to efficiently design soil carbon measurement efforts, though they may not be profitable in the carbon market.

Figure from research showing how economic feasibility is a function of number of fields (project size), carbon price, and carbon accrual (average treatment effect). Figure credit: Eric Potash

“Ultimately the goal is to incentivise these practices,” Potash said. “There is a huge perceived opportunity to reduce carbon emissions from agriculture and build the health of soils. At the moment, projects are being developed with measure-and-model, but we aren’t confident in their benefits. Before this research, it felt like we didn’t have another option. However, we found that there is a better way forward. Measure-and-remeasure can be economical. We think it will help to build confidence in soil carbon accounting more generally, and not just for carbon markets.”

Primary media contacts: Kaiyu Guan (kaiyug@illinois.edu), Eric Potash (epotash@illinois.edu)

Measure-and-remeasure as an economically feasible approach to crediting soil organic carbon at scale.
E Potash, M Bradford, E Oldfield, and K Guan. Environmental Research Letters. 20 (2025) 024025