Hello there!
Welcome to our November Newsletter! In this issue, we are bringing you the latest updates and insights from the NASA Acres Consortium.
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Cultivating Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice in the Workspace with Dr. Stanley Andrisse of P2P
The importance of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) in creating a healthy and supportive workplace cannot be overstated. DEIJ initiatives contribute significantly to fostering a workplace environment that is not only fair and just but also enriching and supportive. In a diverse and inclusive workplace, individuals from various backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, and orientations feel valued and respected. This diversity brings a wide range of perspectives, ideas, and experiences, fostering creativity and innovation.
Working with subject matter experts who are close to the challenges that people face allow for solutions and voices to be heard to create inclusive career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. In this inaugural NASA Acres DEIJ blog, we will share perspectives from our featured partner, Dr. Stanley Andrisse, which speak to the importance of connection, belonging, and diversity. Dr. Andrisse had the opportunity to share his personal story at the most recent NASA Acres Kick Off Meeting in St. Louis. In this blog, he will share 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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Come find us at AGU!
The American Geophysical Union's (AGU) annual fall meeting will be held in San Francisco December 11-15. NASA Acres is hosting two oral and one poster session. We have a great line up of presentations highlighting applications of Earth observations across the United States. We hope to see you there!
Friday, December 15
Description:
The U.S. is one of the world’s top agriculture producers and exporters, supporting food security domestically and worldwide. This vital industry must confront the challenges of environmental change, extreme events, global conflict, shrinking margins for farmers, and supply chain disruptions, all while continuing to feed a growing population and protect ecosystem health.
Recent advances in Earth observation (EO) data resolution, quality, accessibility, and processing have unlocked new potential to meet these challenges through the provision of low-latency, low-cost, actionable agriculture information to decision makers from across the agriculture value chain and into policy chambers. In 2023, NASA commissioned a new transdisciplinary and multisectoral consortium, NASA Acres, to unlock this potential specifically for U.S. agriculture.
NASA Acres is convening this open session to highlight advances, opportunities, and challenges in using EO data for all types of agriculture in the U.S. Abstracts from all are welcome.
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In Early November, over 40 organizations joined NASA Acres in St. Louis for a Kick-Off Meeting, marking its official launch |
On November 2 and 3, NASA Acres hosted its inaugural Kick-Off Meeting at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri, gathering Consortium partners and collaborators from over 40 organizations with a shared commitment to supporting national agriculture and food systems using satellite data and technology.
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Kaiyu Guan, Chief Scientist at NASA Acres is among eight Illinois scientists rank among world's most influential |
Kaiyu Guan, Chief Scientist at NASA Acres is among eight Illinois scientists named to the 2023 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. The list recognizes research scientists and social scientists who have demonstrated exceptional influence – reflected through their publication of multiple papers frequently cited by their peers during the last decade.
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Agricultural crop field sizes are indicative of many factors, such as the degree of agricultural capital investment, mechanization, and labor intensity. Delineated field boundaries, combined with other data, can provide field-level information (e.g. on field size, fertilizer use, productivity) that is more useful than the conventional pixel-level information for agricultural decision making, e.g. regarding land use planning and resources allocation. NASA Acres scientists, David Roy and Lin Yan of Michigan State University, are taking a computer-vision approach to extract crop field objects from Landsat satellite time series wall-to-wall in the Conterminous United States (CONUS) annually for 2008-2026, with core processing undertaken in Amazon Web Services (AWS) where the USGS Collection 2 Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) are stored, and the results will be validated using Google-Earth and NASA high spatial-resolution imagery. In areas where fields are too small to be extracted reliably from Landsat 30m images, the commercial high-resolution images will be considered. The above satellite images highlight their preliminary results of such an example in the Acadiana region in Louisiana where the fields (most planted with sugarcane) are relatively small, incorporating the PlanetScope 3m imagery for field extraction. A new set of computer-vision algorithms were used, which were developed under an ongoing project of the NASA Land Cover Land Use Change (LCLUC) Program to extract crop fields in smallholder regions in Asia using commercial high-resolution satellite imagery. The figure on the left shows the study area in Louisiana visualized using the near infrared, red, and green false-color band combination which is useful for seeing variations in vegetation, displaying vegetated land in shades of red, exposed ground in more of a grey/green, and water in black and blue. The figure on the right shows the extracted field objects colored by the field sizes as small, median, large (see details in the color legend). The PlanetScope imagery with 3m spatial resolution was successful at extracting fields that are smaller than 2 hectares which are difficult to be reliably extracted from Landsat 30m imagery alone (2 hectares correspond to about 22 pixels with 30m resolution).
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The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) requests public inputs to inform the development of the congressionally mandated National Plan for Civil Earth Observations (hereinafter “2023 National Plan”). This notice, which includes a draft of the 2023 National Plan, seeks information to achieve a future vision for continued United States global leadership in enabling and leveraging civil Earth Observations to increase access to Earth data, and address global changes.
Deadline: 12/31/2023
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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 and they want your input.
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Registration is open for USDA's 100th Annual Agricultural Outlook Forum Feb 15-16! This hybrid event will offer insights on topics such as commodity & food price outlooks, ag trade developments, ag innovations, climate change, the bioeconomy, & more.
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Please take a moment to fill out this brief survey to let us know what kind of content you would like to see in the monthly NASA Acres Newsletter. |
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