Jingting Zhang

Dr. Jingting Zhang is a Research Scientist at the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center, Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She previously conducted research at Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland College Park and has worked closely with leading teams in Earth system science and agroecosystem sustainability. Her research focuses on agricultural sustainability, biogeochemistry, and climate-smart agriculture, with particular emphasis on soil carbon dynamics, greenhouse gas emissions, and the impacts of climate change and management practices on agroecosystems. She works at the interface of ecosystem science, process-based modeling, and artificial intelligence to understand how agricultural systems can simultaneously support food production, climate mitigation, and environmental sustainability.

Dr. Zhang’s work has advanced quantitative understanding of carbon sequestration, methane and nitrous oxide emissions, and crop productivity across diverse agricultural systems, from field experiments to regional and global scales. By integrating large observational databases, ecosystem models, remote sensing, and machine learning, she has developed cross-scale frameworks for agricultural greenhouse gas accounting, mechanism-informed prediction, and mitigation strategy assessment. Her research has generated new insights into the trade-offs and synergies among soil carbon storage, greenhouse gas mitigation, and yield stability under changing climate and management conditions.

Her broader goal is to build robust, data-driven, and process-informed approaches for sustainable land management and agricultural climate solutions. Through interdisciplinary research, she seeks to improve the scientific basis for regional adaptation planning, greenhouse gas mitigation pathways, and decision support for resilient and low-carbon agroecosystems.