NASA Harvest News
UMD features NASA Harvest's Africa Lead and SERVIR Food Security Thematic Lead, Catherine Nakalembe! Learn about her early life growing up in Kampala, Uganda and her introduction to geospatial technology to how she began developing applications for Africa.
The Robert N. Colwell Memorial Fellowship recognizes Qadir’s “exceptional interest, desire, ability, and aptitude in the field of remote sensing” and his commitment to developing practical applications of his research.
NASA Harvest has teamed up with Virginia Tech faculty to evaluate and improve the design of agricultural insurance programs using satellite data. Spearheaded by VT's Elinor Benami, we seek to maximize the positive development effects of index insurance programs.
Catherine Nakalembe is a new member of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Council. Specializing in satellite remote sensing and machine learning applications for agriculture and food security, her work focuses on capacity-building for remote sensing in agriculture monitoring, with a particular emphasis on Africa.
NASA Harvest's Inbal Becker-Reshef and Mary Mitkish contribute to Issues in Science and Technology. We highlight how NASA Harvest uses Earth observations to monitor agricultural production in a conflict zone, with an overarching focus on the need for rapid action to support mitigation efforts during unforeseen food security threats.
Survey on Smallholder Yield Modeling
NASA Harvest has been tasked by the US Agency for International Development Feed the Future Initiative (USAID FTF) to evaluate the yield modeling landscape in smallholder settings to inform future interventions and investments.

To get a sense of the landscape beyond academic literature review, we appreciate input from organizations in the commercial and non-governmental sectors on relevant portfolios. The data collected in this survey will be presented to USAID stakeholders in a white paper that may be available for public viewing. Given potential sensitivities of disclosing intellectual property, any part of this survey is optional. Please feel free to contact us with any queries at https://nasaharvest.org/form/contact.
Work With Us
The Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics at Virginia Tech is seeking a Research Associate to assist with a joint NASA Harvest/VA Tech project investigating the use of Earth observation data for agriculture insurance. The successful candidate will join a team investigating the correspondence of remotely sensed indicators to realized losses of policyholders in a variety of agricultural insurance programs across the globe. The position requires evaluating variation in observable agro-environmental conditions as well as on-the-ground data related to yields and livelihoods.

Candidates will be responsible for supporting the research efforts of the team using a variety of tools and methods. These will include preparing geospatial and administrative data for analysis, applying theory-guided statistical approaches to uncover relationships in the data, generating visualizations and maps, preparing manuscripts for submission to peer-reviewed journals, and presenting findings to academic as well as practitioner audiences. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until filled, with a priority deadline of Wednesday, January 31, 2024.
Upcoming Events
NASA Harvest's sister consortium, NASA Acres, will once again attend the Commodity Classic in 2024, 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!
The NASA ARSET (Applied Remote Sensing Training) program is hosting a free online training on how to access and utilize various Earth observation datasets for the monitoring and analysis of global agricultural patterns. Participants will become familiar with data format and quality considerations, tools, and techniques to process remote sensing imagery at large scale from publicly available satellite sources, using various cloud tools.