Harvest Partner Co-Editing Special Issue in Remote Sensing
Global agriculture has changed dramatically in recent years. New technology and techniques have allowed farmers to produce more food on less land than ever before. This has extraordinary potential in terms of increasing farmer incomes and alleviating global food insecurity. This expanded capacity is not guaranteed, however, as climate change increasingly impacts agricultural production.
Today the world’s food systems are more interconnected than ever before, meaning that severe weather events in one area can have ripple effects across the globe. The brunt of these impacts is often felt hardest by the world’s poorest populations who may not have adequate data and resources to anticipate and counter the effects. Therefore it is vital that farmers, policymakers, and those involved in agricultural markets be able to respond quickly and effectively to these problems as they arise to minimize the repercussions.
Remote sensing has shown itself to be an extremely effective tool for this task, allowing for high resolution, high frequency monitoring of crops around the world. Every day researchers are developing new techniques and refining applications in EO-based agricultural monitoring. NASA Harvest’s AI Lead, Hannah Kerner, alongside Laura Harrison of NASA Harvest partner institution UCSB Climate Hazards Center (CHC) are collecting these recent advances in a special issue for the journal Remote Sensing.
The special issue, “Monitoring Climate Impacts on Agriculture Using Remote Sensing Techniques”, is accepting submissions that “focus on remote sensing of climate impacts that can determine the success or failure of seasonal crop production”. Desired topics include the documentation of observed climate impacts on agriculture, new remote monitoring techniques, or developments in the early identification of seasonal crop performance.
In addition to the above examples, potential submissions could include:
Recent climate extremes and hazards to agriculture production
Links to climate trends and regional and global climate drivers
Methods of impact detection, including machine learning or data science techniques
Efforts to improve field or local scale accuracy of remote monitoring
Validation of remote sensing estimates with ground observations
Applications of new and in practice monitoring systems
New public data sets for shared benchmarks or catalyzing future method development
Papers submitted to the Special Issue will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) in Remote Sensing and will be listed on the Special Issue site. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited.
Deadline for manuscript submissions is 31 March 2022. See here for more information on how to submit an article.