Agriculture Conservation Insights

Project title: Evaluating spaceborne hyperspectral approaches for measuring the distribution and performance of agricultural conservation practices

Building resilient agriculture systems is critical for ensuring global food security. Agricultural conservation practices such as planting winter cover crops and maintaining a mulch of crop residue on the soil surface (reduced tillage) are key to building sustainable agricultural systems. Winter cover crops are planted between cash crops to improve soil health, water quality, and nutrient cycling. Reduced tillage improves soil health, preserves crop residue, maintains moisture, and prevents erosion.

However, the environmental impacts of these practices vary with field conditions, management decisions, and weather. Remote sensing provides the ability to monitor conservation performance by measuring biomass quantity and quality. With advanced spaceborne imagery from EMIT, the Precision Sustainable Agriculture’s Remote Sensing Team are developing methods to distinguish between vegetation, residue, and soil fractions, identifying cover crop species and mapping the presence of weeds, and calculating conservation performance of crop residue and cover crops. Output will be used in farmer decision support tools to support precision agricultural nutrient management.

The overarching goals of our project aims to use spaceborne imaging spectroscopy to monitor winter cover crops and crop residue, assess conservation impacts, and accurately measure plant traits such as forage quality and nutrient content. Results will inform adaptive management by conservation stakeholders and collaborators in Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, and Madrid, helping to optimize farm management practices using public facing decision support tools.

Links

NASA JPL EMIT Article

USGS Keeping it Green Outreach Article

NASA Acres Map of the Month

NASA Acres Project Page

SWIR Bands for Crop Residue Detection on the Landsat Next Mission | Land Imaging Report Site

Project Team

	W. Dean Hively
	U.S. Geological Survey	whively@usgs.gov
	Jyoti Jennewein
	U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service	jyoti.jennewein2@usda.gov
	Brian T. Lamb
	U.S. Geological Survey	blamb@usgs.gov
	Alison Thieme
	U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service	alison.thieme@usda.gov

Other team members not pictured: Feng Gao (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service Feng.Gao@usda.gov), Raymond Kokaly (U.S. Geological Survey raymond@usgs.gov), Miguel Quemada (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid miguel.quemada@upm.es), Phil Dennison (University of Utah dennison@ess.utah.edu)