Stanford Harvest Partners Examine Approaches to Crop Yield Measurement in Uganda

Stanford-based NASA Harvest partners Dr. David Lobell and Dr. George Azzari's new report "Eyes in the sky, boots on the ground : assessing satellite- and ground-based approaches to crop yield measurement and analysis in Uganda" has been highlighted as a new World Bank Policy Research Working Paper. Their study utilized data from a survey experiment in Uganda to evaluate the accuracy of Sentinel-2 remotely-sensed maize yields. The research compared the traditional survey assessment, which might use only a sub-section of individual farmers' plots and have varying accuracy and costs, to the use of remotely sensed data available from the Sentinel-2 satellite, which has higher resolution and covers more areas more often than older satellites. The authors found some limitations for correlation with intercropped plots as opposed to pure stand plots.