Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
Once again, this week it was articles about using satellite data to support the agricultural sector that caught our attention. Two reports from the United States about soil health, plus a paper on valuing a farm’s natural assets.
United States
Two articles from Colorado State University described a couple of projects that examine how to turn complex soil data into practical, decision-ready insights, which, as we know from our work this summer, is an area of interest and discussion in the UK.
Firstly, the Terrascope project, is bringing together a range of stakeholders and expertise to develop a single unified platform combining on-the-ground measurements with satellite remote sensing data, to help growers better understand soil conditions and tracking changes over time, to support their decision-making in terms of planting, nutrients and watering.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this US$1 million project will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to combine farmer-provided field records, high-resolution satellite imagery, and other data to reveal patterns. The researchers have indicated that the work has direct input from farmers to ensure it is practical and responsive to their real requirements – again something we picked up in our work this year, sometimes solutions are developed without involving the users which means at best solutions are sub-optimal and at worst, unhelpful. It will be interesting to see what this research work discovers.
Colorado State University has a track record of soil research and has extensive datasets, partially due the diverse soil, topology and climate zones in the state. The second article from the University is about a project to enhance soil moisture monitoring. Historically, soil moisture monitoring in Colorado has been concentrated in high-elevation mountains, with croplands and forests underrepresented, and last year researchers installed 64 additional sensors at underrepresented sites, expanding Colorado’s soli moisture monitoring capacity by roughly 60%, with a further 15 sensors to be installed this year. Alongside the new sensors is a web-based monitoring platform, known as Quench, collecting real-time soil moisture data from multiple networks, alongside historic datasets. This aims to make soil moisture data more available and accessible, and the hope is to also integrate satellite-based soil moisture data into the solution. This should provide an efficient process for reviewing and monitoring soil moisture across the state, providing valuable insights for managing water resources, wildfire risk, drought risk, and support agriculture decision making.
Both projects are exploring how satellite-data can be combined with other information to support decision making for long-term food security and agricultural resilience.
Australia
A paper published last week in Methods in Ecology and Evolution entitled ‘Farm-scale Natural Capital Accounting: Unlocking the potential of natural capital to support sustainable agriculture’ is the third article to catch out attention. Written by Radford & Maisey et al., the researchers developed a Farm‑scale Natural Capital Accounting method, which is aligned to the United Nation’s System of Environmental Economic Accounting framework, and  combines production data, remote sensing, ecological modelling and on-ground assessments, allowing farmers to quantify their natural assets including soil, water, biodiversity, agricultural production and measures of environmental performance such as greenhouse gas emissions, water‑use intensity and pollution.
The project was jointly funded through La Trobe University, Odonata Foundation and the Australian Government through funding from the National Landcare Program under the Natural Heritage Trust.
The researchers noted that farmer’s natural capital assets were invisible in conventional financial accounting systems, but that these assets are critical to their sustainability credentials and overall farm value. The approach offers a way of providing repeatable, verifiable reporting of natural assets and how they change over time, helping address the challenge of providing accurate farm‑level data on biodiversity, ecosystem services and environmental sustainability. Again, this year we had a variety of conversations with farmers and growers in the UK about similar issues regarding natural asset accounting. This is a key issue for the sector and, again, we’ll be interested to see the next steps with this approach.
Summary
Food security and climate resilience agriculture are impacting the entire globe, and issues like soil health, soil moisture, and valuing natural assets are the affecting the agriculture sector around the world and it’s fascinating to see how remote sensing satellite data is contributing to solving these challenges.
