NASA Harvest News
Since it's first satellite launched in 1972, NASA and the USGS' jointly operated Landsat program has transformed how we view the Earth and it's changing surface. The Landsat program has allowed for changes in forest cover, polar ice caps, and urbanization around the world to be monitored and mapped for the last 50 years. One of the most impacted sectors has undoubtedly been agriculture. Remote sensing of the Earth's cropland has allowed researchers, farmers, and policymakers to monitor crops as they grow; pinpoint pest and disease damage; estimate drought damage; and create accurate production estimates. To celebrate Landsat's 50th birthday, NASA Harvest sat down with a group of Landsat, remote sensing, and agricultural experts to discuss how Landsat has revolutionized agricultural monitoring over the last half century and how it can continue driving agricultural improvements.
The NASA Harvest Africa team met with leadership at Carnegie Mellon University Africa in Kigali, Rwanda to learn more about the university and explore opportunities for collaboration. Since the trip, exciting steps have been taken to move these relationships forward and support ongoing and new Harvest activities.
During a September visit to Kigali, Rwanda, the NASA Harvest Africa team met with leadership at the Rwanda Space Agency, building off a virtual introductory meeting earlier in the summer. This productive meeting enabled our two institutions to learn more about each other and for us to explore opportunities for collaboration. Since the trip, exciting steps forward have been taken.
GEOGLAM's December Crop Monitor for AMIS reported mixed conditions for wheat, maize, rice, and soybean crops around the world, with many of areas of concern resulting from dry conditions. The report also predicts a 59% chance of La Niña conditions continuing through March 2023, before settling into neutral ENSO conditions. The Crop Monitor for Early Warning report shows dry conditions impacting planting in the MENA and Central and South Asia regions, while heavy rains and typhoons have impacted harvesting in northern SE Asia.
Building off of previous work mapping cropland across free and temporarily-occupied Ukraine, NASA Harvest estimates significantly higher than expected wheat production. However, note that with more than 1/5 of the nation’s wheat crop under occupation, Ukraine is losing out on more than 1 billion dollars of revenue from just this season's wheat crop alone.
NASA Harvest Director, Inbal Becker-Reshef, spoke with the MIT Tech Review team on how NASA Harvest is using Earth observation data to monitor cropland, determine type of crops that are being planted, and produce yield estimates within Ukraine. As a major crop exporter, understanding how the Russian invasion is impacting agricultural production inside Ukraine is critical to providing transparency and stability to markets and creating lead time to respond to potential food shortages.
Submit Your Work
NASA Harvest's Mehdi Hosseini is co-editing a special issue in the journal Remote Sensing. Editors for the special issue, Radar Remote Sensing for Monitoring Agricultural Management, are accepting submissions that showcase techniques in agricultural monitoring using radar remote sensing. They are particularly interested in studies that look at management techniques around tillage and irrigation; crop damage and phenological stage assessment; data fusion; and cloud computing processing pipelines. Submissions can include research articles, review articles, short communications, and technical notes. Manuscripts are accepted through May 31, 2023.
Career Opportunities
Opportunity at the University of Idaho for post doc with remote sensing experience to work on a three year NASA funded project to harmonize MODIS and VIIRS burned area time series for use in climate analysis. The project aims to create the first global 30 year fire record conventionally required for climate analysis. The position is in the lab of Dr. Luigi Boschetti within the the College of Natural Resources. Successful applicants will have programming experience (R, GDAL, C, IDL); previous experience with MODIS and Landsat; first authored peer review publications; and has previously worked with time series analysis, data fusion, and applied statistics. Questions on the position can be sent to Luigi Boschetti (luigi@uidaho.edu). Interested applicants can apply here.
The University of Maryland’s Center on Global Agricultural Monitoring Research is seeking an outstanding researcher at the Post-doctoral associate level with a strong interest in machine learning and agriculture to join a diverse team working on satellite remote sensing applications for agricultural monitoring and food security, within the framework of the NASA Harvest Program and an on-going collaborative project with FAO and funded by USAID, led by UMD’s Center for Global Agricultural Monitoring.

The successful candidate will work on research related to machine learning applications for crop production forecasting for agricultural systems at the sub-regional to national scale. This will involve developing and documenting models to forecast crop yields in order to inform key agricultural and food security decisions by a range of public and private stakeholders. This research will be carried out through the application of machine learning and process-based modeling techniques and the use of a wide range of satellite data, unique ground collected data-sets, global archives of diverse socio-economic data and statistics. Read the full job posting here.
Upcoming Events
The NASA Harvest Field Boundary Detection Challenge is open for entry! NASA Harvest, Radiant Earth Foundation, Zindi, USDA, and USAID are challenging interested participants to map smallholder fields in Eastern Rwanda. Participants will develop a fine-scale crop boundary classification method using high-resolution multispectral observations from Planet's Planetscope constellation. Contestants have until Feb 26, 2023 to develop and submit their solutions for $5,000 in prizes. More information on competition evaluation criteria and rules can be found here.
NASA will once again attend the Commodity Classic in 2023, where leading agricultural experts will discuss Earth observation data applications for food security challenges, water resource management, crop monitoring and forecasting, and farm management practices. Stop by the NASA booth to learn about NASA's agriculture activities and meet our partners!
NASA Harvest, alongside NASA Applied Sciences and the Navajo Nation Water Management Branch are holding a panel on the use of NASA satellite data to improve food security and water access. The panel will discuss the current efforts of two of NASA program areas (Water Resources and Agriculture) to improve agricultural decision making, better balance conservation and water needs, and more accurately identify hard hit drought areas.
On May 5, 2023 Harvest team members, Carnegie Mellon University Africa, Rwanda Space Agency and Clark University will host the 1st Machine Learning for Remote Sensing Workshop during the International Conference on Learning Representations in Kigali, Rwanda in May 2023. The goal of this workshop is to solicit research papers addressing advancements in the following topics as well as other relevant topics in Machine Learning for Remote Sensing, including solutions specific to the African context.