NASA Harvest News
NASA is increasing its decades-long investment in U.S. agriculture through the launch of NASA Acres, a new domestic-focused consortium that unites physical, social, and economic scientists with leaders in agriculture from public and private sectors. Acres's mission is to bring NASA data, science, and tools down-to-Earth for the benefit of the many people working to feed the nation.
NASA Harvest, alongside NASA Applied Sciences and the Navajo Nation Water Management Branch hosted a food security panel during SXSW 2023. The panelists explained how NASA satellite data helps bolster food security analyses and water access, and how the current efforts of two of NASA's program areas (Water Resources and Agriculture) are working to improve agricultural decision making, better balance conservation and water needs, and more accurately identify hard hit drought areas.
Dr. Catherine Nakalembe highlighted the efforts of the NASA Harvest Africa Initiative at a Devex-hosted 2023 SXSW event, focused on mitigating the effects of climate change on agriculture. Nakalembe spoke on the importance of developing tools that increase satellite data accessibility and usability for farmers and policymakers across vulnerable regions of east and southern Africa.
Harvest Demonstrates Role of Earth Observations for Food Security to G20 Agriculture Minister Meeting
NASA Harvest Chief Scientist, Dr. Chris Justice, and South Asia Lead, Meghavi Prashnani, attended a recent meeting of international Agricultural Ministers to present on the Group on Earth Observation’s Global Agricultural Monitoring (GEOGLAM) activities and how the initiative is using remotely sensed Earth observation data to monitor global agriculture.
2020 Africa Food Prize winner and NASA Harvest Africa Lead, Catherine Nakalembe, met with other former Africa Food Prizes Awardees during the 36th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Awardees spoke on a panel about their journeys before and after receiving the award. Nominations for the 2023 Africa Food Prize remain open through May 16, 2023. The winner will be announced in September in Tanzania.
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
NASA Harvest and the University of Strasbourg are seeking an outstanding researcher at the Post-doctoral or master’s level, with a strong interest in agriculture and machine learning, to join a diverse team working on remote sensing applications for agricultural monitoring and food security. This position is within the framework of a new project in the One-CGIAR Excellence in Agronomy for Sustainable Intensification and Climate Change initiative, on scaling remote sensing-based models for yield estimation across sub-Saharan Africa.

The successful candidate will work on research related to crop yield estimation and forecasting at field to national scales, utilizing state of the art long-term field experiments run by GCIAR over a diverse set of sub-Saharan countries, a range of satellite data including Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Landsat and Planet, and sub-national level statistics. This will involve scaling and enhancing crop yields models, map crop types, in order to inform key agricultural and food security decisions by a range of public and private stakeholders involved in Excellence in Agronomy.

The applicant should:
  • Hold a PhD, or masters in computer science, remote sensing, agricultural or environmental sciences, physics, engineering, mathematics, or related fields.
  • Have a strong programming background (especially Python and R).
  • Demonstrate interest in agriculture and food security research and applications.
  • Possess good communication and writing skills.

The position will remain open until filled. The application, CV and motivation letter, should be send to Yuval Sadeh (yuval.sadeh@monash.edu) and Louise Leroux (louise.leroux@cirad.fr).
Upcoming Events
NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training (ARSET) is building off previous agricultural monitoring workshops with a 3 part online advanced training on the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical imagery for crop mapping. The training will demonstrate advanced remote sensing techniques like polarimetry and dynamic modeling of canopy structure to monitor crop growth. It will also cover the use of machine learning methods of crop type classification using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 datasets. The webinar is available in English and Spanish.
Join leading Earth observation researchers and industry experts at this two-day event, where NASA Harvest Director, Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef, will give a keynote on Harvest and Planet's joint food security response framework. She will discuss the role satellite data plays in the face of agrifood system challenges, specifically highlighting remote sensing applications in response to the war in Ukraine. Network with peers and attend compelling presentations that inspire action, and network with industry thought leaders.
Harvest team members including 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. 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.