Welcome to our Special Edition Newsletter - 2023: A Year in Review! Below, we share some recent updates and recap some of our favorite Consortium highlights from 2023 as NASA Acres has taken off, but first a note from our Executive Director, Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft:
A lot can happen in a year! It was only in April 2023 that NASA Acres formally launched, following a few months of community-building and outreach. Our partners now number over 50, coming from government, research, private space, agricultural value chain, and humanitarian sectors, not to mention those at the center of our program: U.S. farmers and ranchers. We undertook multiple field campaigns, met with hundreds of collaborators from farm to market, advanced “heritage” projects with new technology and collaborators, and set in motion new projects toward reaching our core mission of bringing the value of Earth observations down to U.S. agriculture. We are surer than ever that a food-secure future for all requires a strong, inclusive agricultural workforce with access to the best tools and science to make agriculture productive, resilient, and sustainable today and into the future. All of us at NASA Acres are excited to grow our community and amplify our impact in 2024. We wish you all the best for the coming year!
Sincerely,
Alyssa Whitcraft
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Meeting Maui Community Members Where They Are
Despite having a year-round growing season and rich, productive soil, Hawaii has the highest food costs in the U.S., has a strong reliance on imported foods, and is extremely vulnerable to system shocks. Dr. Hannah Kerner of Arizona State University and her team are addressing the issue in a project with NASA Acres, working with Maui United Way and other local partners to develop a food security dashboard to monitor agricultural production across Maui County. During a January visit, Kerner and colleagues from the University of Maryland met with farmers, listened to community member concerns, and trained local students to collect field data hand-in-hand with the farmers themselves, building a foundation on trust, inclusion, and empowering the next generation.
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NASA Acres Debuted at Commodity Classic
NASA Acres joined other NASA scientists at the 2023 Commodity Classic, the nation’s largest farming convention. Members of the Consortium used the opportunity to introduce NASA Acres to current and prospective commodity association partners with a goal of better understanding farmer priorities, pain points, and needs.
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NASA Acres Consortium Formally Launched
In April of 2023, NASA Acres launched as NASA’s second Consortium devoted to strengthening food security and ag, with a specific emphasis on the United States' own agricultural land. Its creation follows the success of NASA Harvest, a now globally-focused Consortium that has produced significant impacts in the adoption of EO-based methods and tools for food security and agriculture around the world since its inception in 2017. Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft, will serve as the Executive Director of NASA Acres, and bring the experience gained from her leadership working on NASA Harvest and the Harvest SARA initiative on Sustainable and Regenerative Agriculture.
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Dr. Whitcraft Recounted the History of EO for Agriculture on Croptastic: The Innerplant Podcast
Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft, founding Director of NASA Acres joined Innerplant to talk about the new NASA Consortium on U.S. agriculture, the state of satellite-based Earth observations, and where the technology fits in the future of agriculture.
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NASA Acres Welcomed Staff onto its Operations Team
In June, Dr. Whitcraft and Deputy Director Dr. Michael Humber welcomed two members to the NASA Acres Operations Team: Basia Skudrzyk as the Program Coordinator and Nicole Pepper as the Communications and Outreach Coordinator. Stay tuned in 2024, when a new-and-improved NASA Acres website will launch with details on partners, projects, and opportunities to join in.
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NASA Space for Ag Listening Tour Touched Down in Iowa
In late July, NASA’s 2nd Space for Agriculture Listening Tour saw a group of leading NASA scientists in agricultural remote sensing visit with and learn from farmers, industry experts, and extension partners across Iowa corn and soybean farms. The NASA Acres team saw the tour as a unique opportunity to connect with and learn directly from farmers about the information that is needed to develop valuable, Earth observation-based products, tools, and applications.
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NASA Acres Rapidly Mobilized to Support Maui Project Partners' Response to Fire
In the aftermath of the devastating fires in Maui that left at least 100 people dead, NASA Acres Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Lead, Dr. Hannah Kerner and her team rapidly pivoted focus to support Maui United Way - their partner on the Food Security Dashboard project within NASA Acres - in mobilizing aid to impacted Maui communities in the face of a sudden and extreme ecological and humanitarian need. They compiled satellite-based resources to better understand the evolution and impact of the wildfires on Maui, bringing the value of Earth observations to what was most immediately and most importantly needed by our partners.
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NASA Acres Scientist Spots Wine Grape Disease From the Sky
In September, the Los Angeles Times highlighted how a NASA Acres scientist, Dr. Katie Gold of Cornell University, has been using NASA JPL's cutting-edge imaging technology to detect early signs of wine grape disease in the Central Valley of California. Dr. Gold’s team analyzed data captured by NASA’s airborne AVIRIS mission to detect the subtle variations in radiation between healthy and infected grapevines - not visible to the naked eye. “This is the first time we’ve ever shown the ability to do viral disease detection on the airborne scale,” said Dr. Gold, “The next step is scaling to space,” which she will do through her novel NASA Acres project. She will develop non-invasive, scalable methods for disease detection that will not only assist stakeholders in making informed, sustainable management decisions, but also trailblaze novel EO applications with enormous relevance to food security, policy-making, and human health.
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UMD and Kansas State Collaborations Shed Light on the Growing Role of Satellite Data in Understanding Agricultural Management
At the Tri-Societies Conference in St. Louis, MO, UMD postdoc Dr. Guanyuan Shuai shared research supervised by Dr. Ritvik Sahajpal and Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft in collaboration with K-State Soil Scientist Dr. Deann Presley and Extension Agronomists Ron Graber and Rick Schrendler that revealed that farmers in central Kansas have shifted tillage practices on average every 2-3 years since 2010. Dr. Shuai will expand the work to more regions and begin to investigate how these shifts impact yields and yield stability under extreme weather events and severe droughts providing important insight to "what works, where".
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NASA Acres Consortium Kicked Off in St. Louis
NASA Acres hosted its inaugural Kick-Off Meeting at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO, gathering Consortium partners and collaborators from over 40 organizations with a shared commitment to supporting U.S. agriculture using satellite data and technology. As the first Consortium-wide gathering, the Kick-Off Meeting served as an important milestone for aligning on programmic goals, identifying gaps and opportunities, and prioritizing next steps. The work of NASA Acres is intended to build a wider foundation for satellite data to positively impact agriculture in the U.S. and its role world-wide. “Reaching impact for us requires a human touch. We need to be collaborative,” said Dr.Whitcraft.
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NASA Acres Hosted Sessions on EO for U.S. Agriculture at AGU Fall Meeting
Over 25,000 attendees from more than 100 countries came together in San Francisco, California during the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in December 2023. NASA Acres convened oral and poster sessions focused on “Applications of Earth Observations for United States Agriculture” to highlight advances, opportunities, and challenges in using Earth observation data for all types of agriculture in the U.S. This event rounded out a successful first (almost) year and left the Consortium and the EO for the agriculture community ready to hit the ground running in 2024.
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Don't Miss Some of Our Other 2023 Highlights! |
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Dr. Kaiyu Guan, Chief Scientist of NASA Acres and Associate Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has received the prestigious James B. Macelwane Medal from AGU. Guan is recognized for his significant contributions to Earth and space science via his research looking at how climate and human management control productivity and ecosystem services for agricultural systems. As Chief Scientist, Guan will undoubtedly enhance NASA Acres' capabilities with his thoughtful and visionary leadership.
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In this blog, we share perspectives from our featured partner, Dr. Stanley Andrisse, which speak to the importance of connection, belonging, and diversity. He shares his passion for Haitian culture, people, and building evidence-based solutions for inclusive and successful work environments based on the challenging and successful experiences he has had as a person, scholar, mentor, colleague, and faculty member.
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In early October, Dr. Steven Wolf, Associate Professor in the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and NASA Acres partner, hosted the Cornell Agtech Innovation Intermediaries and Sustainability Workshop. This two-day, interactive workshop set the foundation for Wolf's work under NASA Acres, advancing a critical analysis of how existing and emerging Earth observation capabilities - namely agtech entrepreneurship- have the potential to support carbon governance and advance agrifood system sustainability.
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