NASA LCLUC Spring 2016 Webinar Series: Agricultural Monitoring
The NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change (LCLUC) Program would like to invite you to the 2016 Live Spring Webinar Series. The 2016 LCLUC Webinar Series features LCLUC projects focusing on detection and monitoring of land-cover and land-use changes. These projects contribute to the revised science questions identified in the Land Use Land Cover Change theme of the 2003 U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan: "What observations and methods are needed to quantitatively characterize historic and current land-use and land-cover dynamics that influence the sustainability of human societies and the environment?" and "What are the primary drivers and processes of land-use and land-cover change and how do they interact?".
The past webinars in this series have focussed on urban and agricultural studies. The Spring 2016 webinar series focus on the theme-Agriculture. The current webinar presents agricultural monitoring and is a continuation of the previous webinar in this series.
Thursday April 28, 2016- 2:00 PM (EST), 1:00PM (CST), 11:00 AM (PST)
Climatic consequences of deforestation and forest degradation in the Amazon agricultural frontier
Woods Hole Research Center
We have known that tropical deforestation changes the surface energy balance and water cycle. We have recently come to understand that it is the largest source of climate change in the Amazon and that the amount of change that occurs strongly depends on how the land is used following deforestation. Using a combination of field research, satellite remote sensing, and computer modeling, we show how agricultural expansion has altered climate in southeastern Amazonia, why management practices matter, and how protected forests mitigate the impacts.
Satellite derived crop field size information and change
South Dakota State University
The spatial distribution of agricultural fields is a fundamental description of rural landscapes. The size of fields is indicative of the degree of agricultural capital investment, mechanization and labor intensity. Field size distributions and their changes have not been studied over large areas as field size datasets are not publicly available. Changing field sizes may have significant impacts on landscape spatial configuration and land use diversity with ecological and biogeochemical consequences. Satellite data and, in particular, the data provided by the near-global long term Landsat series, provide the potential to monitor field size changes and provide geographic context for observed changes. Results showing field size changes around the world are first presented. Then the results of a computer vision approach to extract field sizes automatically from Landsat 5 TM and Landsat 7 ETM+ 30m time series are presented. Notably, in 2010 for all the conterminous United States (CONUS) a total of 4.18 million fields were extracted with mean and median field sizes of 0.193 km2 and 0.278 km2 respectively. The results were validated by comparison with field boundaries manually digitized from Landsat 5 and Google-Earth high resolution imagery. Recommendations for future work including global application are discussed.
Immediately after you submit the registration form, you'll receive an email with a link to connect to the session. During the Webinar, you can receive audio directly through your computer speakers for free. We regret if the timing of this session isn't optimal for you. A recorded version of the session will be made on available our website.