Community resilience is frequently defined as the ability of a community to prepare, respond, and recover from natural and human-caused hazards. Preparedness is a vital aspect of community resilience, but our existing frameworks and emergency guidelines generally focus on response, rather than seeking to understand the connection between events and preparing for subsequent hazards. The majority of disasters involve a chain of events occurring in a cascading manner.

Farmers in the United States (US) Corn Belt produce ~30% of the world’s corn and soybean, which depends on the use of fertilizers containing both nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P). However, due to a lack of consistent and reliable information, these farmers tend to over-apply fertilizer. This practice directly affects farmers, as they are paying higher fertilizer costs than necessary, and negatively impacts environmental sustainability. Yet, farmers’ perceptions of nutrient management challenges vary widely as does their willingness to adopt novel nutrient management approaches.

Food access is an unfortunate but very real problem for the many Americans that live in food deserts where the combination of distance to full service supermarkets and access to transportation makes healthy, affordable food less attainable. Today's technological innovations have the potential to address this problem, however they must be adapted to apply to the challenging socio-economic conditions of these communities.