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Now available in PDF format: Abstract Book [7.4 Mb] (posted 10 November 2005)

Abstracts for Posters

Food Production (P-FP)

Sub-Theme 1: Remote Sensing Applications

P-FP1.1

The Multiple Roles of Satellite Data in Livelihood Based Famine Early Warning for Decision Makers

Molly Brown, SSAI GSFC NASA, molly.brown@gsfc.nasa.gov

Christopher Funk, University of California Santa Barbara

Tanya Boudreau, Chemonics International

Compton Tucker, GSFC NASA

For nearly two decades, the United States' Agency for International Development's Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) has advised local, national and international partners on African food security issues. During the past four years, this program has expanded to two more regions and will soon be available to those countries worldwide who request the program. A founding partner of the program, NASA has contributed real time satellite data for rangeland health, cropped area and rainfall estimation. FEWS NET has implemented a new approach to quantifying food security that incorporates food prices, wealth ranking and levels of vulnerability with agricultural production information in a decision support system. The livelihoods-based food security early warning system is an analytical framework designed to help decision-makers understand the effects of different "shocks" on household-level livelihood options and focuses on areas that are highly sensitive to biophysical hazards such as drought. The livelihoods analysis is used in a broader early warning system that organizes information about people living in rural and urban households and, when necessary, connects it to decision makers providing different types of assistance in support of their lives. The quantitative representation of the different food and cash income options available to different types of households in a particular geographic area is typically presented in a baseline report and a food economy spreadsheet designed to facilitate food security outcome analysis. Satellite data can be used in each level of the food security analysis once the baseline study on food economy has been conducted. Satellite derived products contribute to estimates of the area of food crops planted in a particular year (LandSAT data), monitoring of crop health throughout the season (TRMM), estimates of the percent of normal production harvested (MODIS, AVHRR), development of rangeland depletion curves (MODIS, TRMM), and inputs to models projecting food price changes over the coming year (AVHRR, SPOT Vegetation). As a recently funded NASA application, we are currently developing short-term (1-3 month) projections of these indicators to improve early warning of food insecurity for decision and policy makers worldwide.

[Poster PDF]

P-FP1.2

Global Agricultural Monitoring: Science Information to Inform Decision Making

Chris Justice, Department of Geography, University of Maryland College Park, justice@hermes.geog.umd.edu

Brad Dorn, Foreign Agricultural Service, USDA

Matthew Hansen, South Dakota State University

Jim Tucker, GSFC/NASA

Assaf Anyamba, GSFC/NASA

Mark Sullivan, University of Maryland

Inbal Reshef, University of Maryland

The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project aims to enhance the agricultural monitoring and crop production estimation capabilities of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA/FAS) using NASA's moderate resolution satellite data. The project is a collaboration between NASA/GSFC, USDA/FAS, and University of Maryland College Park (UMD) Department of Geography, in the framework of a joint NASA/USDA MOU to foster increased cooperation between the two agencies.

The primary mission of the FAS is to provide agricultural information for global food security through delivery of objective, timely and regular assessments of global agricultural production outlook and the conditions affecting it. To meet its objectives, the FAS uses satellite data and products to monitor agriculture and to locate and keep track of the climatic factors that impair agricultural productivity such as short and long-term droughts, floods and persistent snow cover. These data are used to augment regional field-based reporting and help in the decision-making process.

To monitor crop conditions, the FAS analysts are provided with multiple remotely sensed products from moderate resolution sensors for target agricultural regions worldwide. This includes providing USDA crop analysts with a sophisticated web interface for analyzing MODIS temporal composites of vegetation index (VI) data, at 250-meter resolution. The web interface provides analysis tools which allow the crop analysts to drill down to the pixel level of detail. Using these data and tools, FAS analysts track the evolution of the growing season and make inter-annual comparisons of season dynamics between individual years as well as relative to reference long-term mean conditions. These comparisons yield anomaly images and plots that highlight regions that are less productive relative to previous years due for example to drought and heat stress as well as regions that experienced favorable climatic conditions and thus are more productive. For instance, this year eastern Africa experienced a severe drought leaving millions in need of food aid. Using the VI time series and web analysis tools FAS analysts tracked this drought and its effects on agricultural lands forewarning the appropriate decision makers of the crisis. For near real time assessment and evaluation of disaster events such as floods FAS analysts have access to daily global data through the MODIS Rapid Response system which delivers data within 2-4 hours of satellite acquisition.

Although still in its developmental stages, GLAM has proved to be a success, improving FAS' ability to monitor global crop production and its response to climate. The extensive web accessible DBMS, provides a substantial opportunity for a range of applications requiring frequent global
moderate resolution data such as the analysis of trends, assessment of the severity of drought conditions and serving as drought early warning system.

[Poster PDF]

P-FP1.3

An Agricultural Information System Based on Satellite Remote Sensing Data for Decision Making

Bill Teng, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, teng@daac.gsfc.nasa.gov

Monitoring global agricultural crop conditions during the growing season and estimating potential seasonal production are critically important for market development of U.S. agricultural products and for global food security. The Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) has developed an Agricultural Information System (AIS), based on the GES DISC Interactive Online Visualization and Analysis Infrastructure (Giovanni-Ag), which can operationally provide satellite remote sensing data products (e.g., rainfall) and analysis services. Currently available data include NASA satellite precipitation and other gauge analyses products. Comparison of the 0.25 degree 3-hourly Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (MPA) product with limited gauge analysis has shown that the MPA can complement some currently available precipitation products, such as the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) precipitation analyses, to provide more accurate rainfall information, especially in remote or sparsely gauged areas. The USDA currently uses AFWA data for operational crop production forecasting. The AIS will enable the remote, interoperable access to distributed data, by using the GrADS-Data Server (GDS) and by being compliant with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. AIS outputs are currently being integrated into existing operational decision support systems for global crop monitoring, such as those of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service and the U.N. World Food Program.

[Poster PDF]

P-FP1.4

Integrating Remote Sensing and Other Products into the Decision Support Systems
of the United Nations World Food Programme

Zhong Liu, CEOSR George Mason University and NASA GSFC DAAC, zliu@daac.gsfc.nasa.gov

Lenard Milich, United Nations World Food Programme

William Teng

Long Chiu

Steven Kempler

Hualan Rui

This presentation will describe our collaborative work with the World Food Programme of the United Nations, including web-based information services and tools to assess global and regional water related issues, such as, floods and droughts.

Set-up in 1963, the World Food Programme (WFP) is the United Nations frontline agency in the fight against global hunger. WFP depends on donors worldwide. The United States of America has been the largest donor. Natural disasters, such as, floods and droughts, occur every year in third world countries and often require emergency food aid. Moving large quantities of foods is not an easy task. Time and planning are required. Accurate and timely environmental information will facilitate decision-making and food distribution and maximize the use of contributions.

Few observational data are available for disaster monitoring in remote and poor countries. Satellite observations provide a unique way in providing such data from space. The first author and Dr. Lenard Milich of WFP have been collaborating for the past three years on ways to integrate NASA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) data into forward planning exercises for establishing geographic areas (e.g., sub-equatorial Africa, Indonesia, and North Korea) in need of food assistance. However, several issues still remain, such as, expertise and significant resources required for data access and analysis, uncertainties in rainfall estimates, etc.

Our current and future activities will focus on the removal of these roadblocks by enhancing our existing tools for global water and disaster management activities. In particular, the tools will allow to: 1) Monitor global precipitation; 2) Reveal local and regional rainfall surplus/deficit; 3) Reveal uncertainties in near-real-time and climatological/baseline products to better estimate rainfall for flood/drought monitoring and anomalies; 4) Derive climatological information for coastal zones; 5) Derive ENSO rainfall products to understand changes during ENSO events; 6) Use global image viewers for accessing geostationary satellite and NASA MODIS imagery to assess flooding/drought ground conditions; and 7) Prepare presentations for potential donors.

These tools will not only benefit the WFP decision-making activities, but also other local agencies and the general public. All data and services are web-based to minimize the cost for accessing and maximize the use of global rainfall data products.

[Poster PDF]

P-FP1.5

Climate Constraints, Water Limitation and Global Food Security

Felix Kogan, NOAA/NESDIS, Felix.Kogan@noaa.gov

In view of the rapid world population increase and the declining stock of natural resources, climate variability and change raised serious concerns about water availability and future capacity of world food production. There are two climate aspects related to water limitations and global food security: current and future climate constraints. Estimates showed that since the 1970s, world dry areas have increased 2.5 times; summer dryness in the interior of the continents and regional drought intensity and frequency is on a rise; in many developed countries climate limitations led to agricultural production leveling off. Additional constraints have been produced by a human-induced large-scale land cover/land use changes (conversion of natural steppe vegetation into agricultural fields, excessive withdrawal of surface water for irrigation, desertification, deforestation, siltation of irrigated lands, pasture overgrazing) which led to water limitation and restrains in agricultural production. A growing public concerns is that human-induced climate changes (temperature increase, reduction of snow and ice cover, etc.) will lead to changes in weather extremes, especially such damaging for agriculture natural disasters as droughts. Even present observations show that in some areas frequencies of environmental disasters is gradually increasing along with the global temperature rise. This presentation will address climate constraints in relation to water limitation with the corresponding consequences for agriculture and global food security issues. It will also discuss such adverse natural disaster as drought which affects severely water resource and agricultural production. Even under current climate conditions drought is known to affect main agricultural areas and highly populated regions of the developing countries. According to future climate scenarios, drought frequencies and intensity is expected to increase progressively with climate warming. This will have wide-reaching effects on availability of food and on the number of poor and undernourished people. The results of this presentation will be based on analysis of long time series of satellite and in situ data.