NASA Harvest News
NASA Harvest Director Inbal Becker-Reshef and Harvest ML/AI Lead Hannah Kerner discuss how NASA Harvest is using machine learning and Earth observations to rapidly respond to critical events impacting global agriculture and food security, including our work mapping cropland and estimating yields within Ukraine.
Building off of previous work mapping cropland across free and temporarily-occupied Ukraine, NASA Harvest estimates significantly higher than expected wheat production. However, note that with more than 1/5 of the nation’s wheat crop under occupation, Ukraine is losing out on more than 1 billion dollars of revenue from just this season's wheat crop alone.
The GEOGLAM Crop Monitor for AMIS has released its 100th report this month. The report evaluates growing conditions of major commodity crops within the members of the G20, as well as 7 additional countries that represent important producers and exporters. Together these countries produce between 80-95% of global production, making the monthly Crop Monitor reports a critical resource in estimating global supply months ahead of harvest.
NASA Harvest’s AI lead, Hannah Kerner, is partnering with Maui United Way and Responsible Markets to create a GIS-enabled food security dashboard that will combine Earth observation data with socioeconomic and price datasets. This tool will fill knowledge gaps in agricultural production across Maui County, with a focus on indigenous farmers.
NASA Harvest recently attended the 2022 AGRF Summit in Kigali, Rwanda, an event that brings together stakeholders from around the world to take action and share lessons to move African agriculture forward. During the summit, NASA Harvest and our partners officially co-launched the Regional Food Balance Sheet, an innovative tool that shows a complete picture of regional food availability, including: production, imports, change in stocks on the supply, exports, food availability for human consumption, losses, feed, seed, and industrial utilization.
NASA Harvest Director, Inbal Becker-Reshef, spoke with the MIT Tech Review team on how NASA Harvest is using Earth observation data to monitor cropland, determine type of crops that are being planted, and produce yield estimates within Ukraine. As a major crop exporter, understanding how the Russian invasion is impacting agricultural production inside Ukraine is critical to providing transparency and stability to markets and creating lead time to respond to potential food shortages.
In a new partnership between NASA and the University of Maryland (led by PI Dr. Alyssa Whitcraft), researchers in the Department of Geographical Sciences have been tapped to lead a five-year consortium to turn satellite data into down-to-earth, actionable information to support agriculture in the United States.
Christina Justice, NASA Harvest’s Food Security Early Warning Co-Lead, was awarded the Group on Earth Observations (GEO)’s Individual Excellence Award. This award celebrates her exceptional achievements in improving global food security monitoring, specifically in leading the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor for Early Warning (CM4EW) - a monthly report operational since 2016 highlighting agricultural conditions across regions at risk of food insecurity produced in partnership with the major global agriculture and food security monitoring agencies.
Submit Your Work
NASA Harvest's Mehdi Hosseini is co-editing a special issue in the journal Remote Sensing. Editors for the special issue, Radar Remote Sensing for Monitoring Agricultural Management, are accepting submissions that showcase techniques in agricultural monitoring using radar remote sensing. They are particularly interested in studies that look at management techniques around tillage and irrigation; crop damage and phenological stage assessment; data fusion; and cloud computing processing pipelines. Submissions can include research articles, review articles, short communications, and technical notes. Manuscripts are accepted through May 31, 2023.
Career Opportunities
The University of Twente in the Netherlands is hiring an Assistant Professor In Spatial modelling for climate-smart food systems. The role will conduct research on the use of Earth observation data and other spatial data for modeling climate-smart agriculture and develop and teach courses on spatial modeling.

Successful candidates should have a PhD related to crop, water, ecosystem services and/or economic modelling applied to food systems; be comfortable programming or scripting in Python, R, or similar languages; and have an interest in translating your research and education into practical applications and collaborating with diverse stakeholders.

Applications are open through Dec 14. Read more about the position here.
Opportunity at the University of Idaho for post doc with remote sensing experience to work on a three year NASA funded project to harmonize MODIS and VIIRS burned area time series for use in climate analysis. The project aims to create the first global 30 year fire record conventionally required for climate analysis. The position is in the lab of Dr. Luigi Boschetti within the the College of Natural Resources. Successful applicants will have programming experience (R, GDAL, C, IDL); previous experience with MODIS and Landsat; first authored peer review publications; and has previously worked with time series analysis, data fusion, and applied statistics. Questions on the position can be sent to Luigi Boschetti (luigi@uidaho.edu). Interested applicants can apply here.
The University of Maryland’s Center on Global Agricultural Monitoring Research is seeking an outstanding researcher at the Post-doctoral associate level with a strong interest in machine learning and agriculture to join a diverse team working on satellite remote sensing applications for agricultural monitoring and food security, within the framework of the NASA Harvest Program and an on-going collaborative project with FAO and funded by USAID, led by UMD’s Center for Global Agricultural Monitoring.

The successful candidate will work on research related to machine learning applications for crop production forecasting for agricultural systems at the sub-regional to national scale. This will involve developing and documenting models to forecast crop yields in order to inform key agricultural and food security decisions by a range of public and private stakeholders. This research will be carried out through the application of machine learning and process-based modeling techniques and the use of a wide range of satellite data, unique ground collected data-sets, global archives of diverse socio-economic data and statistics. Read the full job posting here.
The Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland is searching for three new IT positions:

Senior Systems Engineer
Sr. Systems Engineer is responsible for full life cycle management of the department Hadoop Clusters, Web servers, SFTP servers, database servers and VMware VDI environments including designing and setting up distributed computing, associate storage, security, patching and automation of configuration and deployment. Learn more and apply here.

Senior Storage Engineer
Sr. Storage Engineer is responsible for large PB scale storage environments in the department and GLAD environments. Learn more and apply here.

Senior Linux Engineer
Sr. Linux Engineer is responsible for full life cycle management of the department and GLAD HPC Linux environment including designing and setting up distributed computing, associate storage, security, patching and automation of configuration and deployment. Learn more and apply here.
Upcoming Events
NASA Harvest and the Farmers Business Network are hosting a joint symposium at this year's Farmer2Farmer event, with a focus on climate impacts on agriculture. As severe weather events continue to increase and agricultural decision-making becomes even more complex, we will highlight satellite data applications for bolstering resilient farming systems into the future.
The American Geophysical Union's (AGU) annual fall meeting will be held in Chicago this year. As always, the meeting serves as an opportunity for scientists, policymakers, students, and organizations to connect and discuss leading research in the field of Earth science.
NASA will once again attend the Commodity Classic in 2023, 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!