NASA Harvest News
Inbal Becker-Reshef, Director of NASA Harvest, was invited to talk about crop monitoring and food security by the US Embassy in Egypt. During the webinar she discusses the history, goals, and current work of the NASA Harvest program with a focus on satellite data applications in support of global food security and informed decision-making. With Egypt being one of the world's top importers of wheat, the tightening of global supply resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine was of particular focus. As she discusses during the video, "The war in Ukraine, Covid pandemic, warming climate, and increasing extreme weather events highlight the need for transparent actionable information from space to inform sustainable, resilient food production decision, agricultural markets, and disaster response measures."
Harvest experts have spent several months delineating and mapping cropland across all of Ukraine. This has allowed us to monitor planting, crop conditions, and harvest progress within the country; compare current statistics to previous years; and estimate upcoming production. Our latest results using Planet high resolution imagery are highlighted in this blog post.
GEOGLAM’s Crop Monitor for Early Warning has released a special Conflict and Food Security Report detailing agricultural production and access issues facing Northern Ethiopia as a result of the Ethiopian Civil War. These special reports provide in-depth analyses on complex food security challenges arising from conflict-stricken regions.
NASA Harvest scientists joined Earth Science Division Leadership in a 2022 farm tour across Nebraska and Kansas. NASA scientists toured farms across the US Corn Belt as part of the Agency’s effort to better link with farmers and agricultural producers, and to improve how NASA shares and expands its data archives.
Gary Eilerts, Harvest's Food Security Early Warning Co-Lead, writes about the evolution of global food insecurity from the late 20th to 21st centuries. The increase of agricultural import reliant countries can turn local disasters into global issues - with major producers often being major consumers, consumption is just as important a variable in global access as production.
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.
Guest editors from the University of Maryland, including Harvest's Data Lead, Mike Humber, are accepting submissions to their Special Issue "Remote Sensing Applications in Wildfire Research and Management" in the journal Remote Sensing. The editors "aim to collect recent accomplishments in the field of remotely sensed wildfire products, modeling, and monitoring with the hope to inspire further development of fire-related remote sensing methodologies. These works can include developments related to remote-sensing-derived fire products as well as developments in the estimation and understanding of how fire interacts with other variables at the landscape scale, such as fuel build-up, fuel post-fire succession, fire regimes, and vegetation type." Manuscripts are accepted through October 20, 2022.
Career Opportunities
The University of Idaho seeks a 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 about the position can be sent to Luigi Boschetti (luigi@uidaho.edu). Interested applicants can apply here.
The Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland is searching for three new IT positions with a best consideration date of 10/2/22:

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
Interested in the world of high resolution satellite imagery? Planet, a private company that provides daily EO data at a variety of scales down to sub-meter resolutions, is providing a workshop on their current and future Earth Observation products.
The 22nd William T. Pecora Memorial Remote Sensing Symposium (Pecora 22) is in Denver, Colorado this year. The conference will be hosted by NASA and the USGS, with an overarching theme of Opening the Aperture to Innovation: Expanding Our Collective Understanding of a Changing Earth, which embraces both the innovations and discoveries that resulted from 50 years of Landsat Earth observations, and also current and future innovations in science and technology that are contributing to our ability to improve our understanding and better manage the Earth’s environment.
Alyssa Whitcraft, Program Manager of NASA Harvest, has been invited to speak about satellite-based agricultural monitoring at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' 2022 Ascend conference in Las Vegas. Her panel will focus on how spaceborne Earth observations are impacting research on greenhouse gases, wildfire, sea level change, and agriculture.
The American Geophysical Union's (AGU) annual fall meeting will be held in Chicago this year. As always, the meeting serves as opportunity for scientists, policymakers, and students, and organizations to join and discuss leading research in the field of earth science. NASA Harvest will be in attendance and information on our poster and oral sessions will be made available ahead of time. Looking forward to meeting you there!