Farmers need to make decisions on irrigation and soil moisture, tillage practices, cover crops, and crop rotations, which all take time and cost money. This project centers on using satellite remote sensing and field IoT devices to support crop water management decision making.
Major crops across Lower Mississippi US; rangelands in western US; JECAM sites, expanding to CONUS row crops by 2020
Decisions such as irrigation, pest management and conservation practices are made at the field scale or the livelihood scale – farmers therefore need information at this moderate resolution scale to make sound decisions that directly relate to their fields. Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) platforms are thus key to growing the conservation agriculture economy. They can serve as a bridge between tech, sustainable resource use, and industry. In this project, satellite data and EO technologies, along with other tools, such as big data software and process-based crop modeling create cost effective tools to help reduce the burden on farmers, and therefore inform and optimize management decisions and outcomes. Open access operational synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical satellite earth observations (EO) are key to scaling the next generation of agricultural decision support tools.
SAR can penetrate clouds and provides information at the 10m resolution, taken every few days. It is useful also due to its sensitivity to structure, orientation, roughness and moisture, providing a more complete picture of the target. Instruments used to support crop water management include Sentinel-1, HLS (Landsat-8, Sentinel-2), UAVSAR, PALSAR-2, GOES-R, MODIS.
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s funds the South America soybean assessment. There has been past NASA support for USA soybean assessment.