NASA Harvest at the 2022 Pecora Meeting

Multiple members of the NASA Harvest spent the last week of October in Denver, Colorado attending the 2022 Pecora Meeting. The conference saw a number of Harvest-affiliated speakers on various panels, technical sessions, and NASA hyperwall talks. Additionally, in celebration of the NASA Landsat mission’s 50th birthday, Harvest organized a session highlighting how the Landsat mission has revolutionized agricultural monitoring over the half century.

The Director of NASA Harvest’s Africa Program, Catherine Nakalembe, opened up the conference as a panelist for the opening plenary session focusing on the “state-of-the-art” Earth observation capabilities.

Nakalembe followed her plenary discussion with two more events on Pecora’s opening day. First she attended a panel hosted by the Ladies of Landsat, an organization of remote sensing-focused scientists who aim to help women and other underrepresented groups feel welcome and included within the field of remote sensing. She then spoke at a technical session outlining her work in agricultura monitoring capacity building in Africa as part of the NASA Harvest program.

The Harvest session on Wednesday showcased presentations from Darryl Williams, Chief Scientist at Global Science & Technology, Inc.; David Johnson, geographer at the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service; Brad Doorn, program manager for NASA’s water resources and agriculture program; Matt Hansen, director of the GLAD lab at the University of Maryland; and Lin Yan , Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan.

Throughout the conference, NASA hosted a number of Hyperwall presentations in the exhibit hall. On the final day of the Pecora meeting, NASA Harvest’s Program Manager, Alyssa Whitcraft delivered a NASA Hyperwall talk on the Harvest program’s current progress in cropland and crop type mapping, yield forecasting, and regenerative agriculture, as well as where Harvest intends to expand in the future. 

See you next year Pecora!