SHARE:  
Join Our Email List
Hello there!

Welcome to our October Newsletter! In this issue, we are bringing you the latest updates and insights from the NASA Acres Consortium.
October Spotlight
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. As the first Consortium-wide gathering, the Kick-Off Meeting served as an important milestone by bringing together collaborators from across the agricultural sector to align on programmic goals and prioritize next steps.
NASA Acres is going to 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.
NASA Acres in the News
Advances in soil moisture retrieval from multispectral remote sensing using unoccupied aircraft systems and machine learning techniques
Dr. Teamrat Ghezzehei, NASA Acres Scientist, was a contributing author for a recently published study that investigates the ability of machine learning models to retrieve the surface soil moisture of a grassland area from multispectral remote sensing carried out using an unoccupied aircraft system (UAS).

Live plant pathogens can travel on dust across oceans
A preliminary study by Cornell researchers including co-author Dr. Kaitlin Gold, assistant professor of plant pathology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell AgriTech and NASA Acres Pest and Disease Lead, have found that soilborne pathogens have the potential to be transported as dust particles.

Maui United Way and NASA Collaboration Expedites Aid for Maui Wildfire Survivors
MauiTime posted a great article on how, in the aftermath of the devastating fires in Maui, NASA Acres and NASA Harvest scientists, Dr. Hannah Kerner and Gabriel Tseng, collaborated with Maui United Way to create an app that uses satellite data to verify areas impacted by the Maui wildfires and expedite emergency assistance to residents in response.
NASA Acres in the News
Map of the Month
NASA Harvest's Dr.JillianDeines and her team have published field-scale planting date maps for the U.S. Midwestover the past 20 years. The above maps show how planting dates for maize and soybean have changed across the study area from 2000 to 2020. Positive values (purple) indicate trends towards later planting dates and negative values (brown) indicate trends towards earlier planting dates. The team made a number of interesting findings that better illuminate the effectiveness of planting decisions across the Midwestern US. For instance, they found that during the years studied, 2000-2020, a standard deviation increase in early-season rainfall led to delays in planting by 2.5 days.
Announcements
The School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS) in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) at Cornell University welcomes applications for a full-time tenure-track position in geospatial science for sustainable land processes and management at the assistant professor level. Our new colleague will join a Cohort Faculty Hire in Creating a Climate-Resilient Future.

Deadline to Apply: 2023/12/01, 11:59PM

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.

Upcoming Events
Dec. 11-15, 2023 | San Francisco, California
Hybrid
The American Geophysical Union's (AGU) annual fall meeting will be held in San Francisco this year. NASA Acres is organizing two oral and one poster session on Friday, December 15, click here for details!
We Want Your Feedback!
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.