NASA Harvest Bridges Research and Operations

The Program Director of NASA Harvest, Dr. Inbal Becker-Reshef, spoke about the agricultural applications of remote sensing as part of the NASA Goddard Seminar Series. Presenting on the recent activities of NASA Harvest, Dr. Becker-Reshef also stressed the importance of transitioning research into operations through the development of end user systems and stakeholder partnerships.

“Our primary goal is to enable the adoption of satellite data in support of agricultural monitoring, in support of food security, markets, and sustainability both in the US and across the globe. As an Applied Sciences program, we are very much a bridge between research and operations and are therefore very stakeholder and end user driven.”

During her presentation, Dr. Becker-Reshef discusses the research NASA Harvest is doing including the development of cropland maps, crop yield forecasts, and advanced meta-learning machine learning models. She also spoke about how these tools and data are then made available to policymakers and stakeholders through the creation of open access tools and various reporting mechanisms like the Harvest GLAM tool, Crop Monitor Reports, and the Harvest AGMET Dashboard.