Our best wishes are with all of you around the world during this unprecedented time. We wish you and your families health and well-being. NASA Harvest remains up and running, and we continue to work to understand agriculture, food security, and the many aspects that impact it. Read below for a recap of recent events.
NASA Harvest News
This year, many countries in eastern Africa have seen the worst desert locust outbreak in over two decades. NASA Harvest partners teamed up in an effort to best provide remotely-sensed data and other agricultural monitoring resources to aid governments and farmers with crop forecasting and locust migration tracking.
NASA Harvest partners at IFPRI address how trade restrictions negatively impact food security, compare the COVID-19 recession to the 2007-2008 recession, and provide advice on keeping food prices and availability stable.
In many regions of Africa, droughts can have adverse impacts on crop production which may result in food scarcity, famine, and even widespread infectious disease. Our colleagues produced high-resolution drought dataset that can analyze and inform drought hazard probability.
Estefania Puricelli, NASA Harvest Lead Economist, presented some of the recent projects on behalf of partners of the consortium, highlighting private public partnerships where the reinsurance sector and the remote sensing scientists work together in order to make crop cuts more efficient.
Upcoming Events
The IAMO 202 Forum will take place online this year, with a focus on the influence that digital technologies have on the food and agriculture industry across Eurasia. NASA Harvest partners have organized a 90-minute session "Digital platforms to forecast and facilitate international markets and trade" which will address the use of available tools for food market and trade forecasting and analysis.
Chris Justice, Alyssa Whitcraft, and Jean-Claude Roger will represent NASA Harvest at various sessions during the 2020 IGARSS Symposium . Conference topics will center around modern remote sensing developments, scientific collaboration and idea-exchange, identification of trends in the industry, and networking across the international remote sensing community. Session details are forthcoming, but here is a sneak peak of what NASA Harvest has planned.