Crop Intensity
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- Visualizations by:
- Lori Perkins
- View full credits
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to strengthen collaboration. In support of this collaboration, NASA and the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) jointly funded a new project to assimilate NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data and products into an existing decision support system (DSS) operated by the International Production Assessment Division (IPAD) of FAS. To meet its objectives, FAS/IPAD uses satellite data and data products to monitor agriculture worldwide and to locate and keep track of natural disasters such as short and long term droughts, floods and persistent snow cover which impair agricultural productivity. FAS is the largest user of satellite imagery in the non-military sector of the U.S. government. For the last 20 years FAS has used a combination of Landsat and NOAA-AVHRR satellite data to monitor crop condition and report on episodic events.
To successfully monitor worldwide agricultural regions and provide accurate agricultural production assessments, it is important to understand the spatial distribution of croplands. To do this a global croplands mask to identify all sites used for crop production. Croplands are highly variable both temporally and spatially. Croplands vary from year to year due to events such as drought and fallow periods, and they vastly differ across the globe in accordance with characteristics such as cropping intensity and field size. A flexible crop likelihood mask is used to help depict these varying characteristics of global crop cover. Regions featuring intensive agro-industrial farming practices such as the Maize Triangle in South Africa will have higher confidence values in the crop mask as compared to less intensively farmed regions in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where cropland identification is partly confounded with natural background vegetation phenologies. Thus, a customized threshold can be employed to examine areas of varying cropping intensification.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
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Animator
- Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
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Visualizer
- Cindy Starr (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
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Scientists
- Chris Justice (University of Maryland)
- Inbal Becker Reshef (University of Maryland)
- Matt Hansen (South Dakota State University)
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Producer
- Michelle Williams (UMBC)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
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Terra and Aqua NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI))
ID: 633 -
Terra and Aqua VI (Composite Vegetation Index)
ID: 632 -
Gridded Population of the World (Version 3 Beta)
ID: 272 -
Crop Intensity (Crop Intensity 1KM)
ID: 698
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.