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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 09 2018, @10:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the probably-spotting-marijuana-as-well dept.

Corn and soybean fields look similar from space - at least they used to. But now, scientists have proven a new technique for distinguishing the two crops using satellite data and the processing power of supercomputers.

"If we want to predict corn or soybean production for Illinois or the entire United States, we have to know where they are being grown," says Kaiyu Guan, assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, Blue Waters professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the principal investigator of the new study.

University of Illinois scientists used short-wave infrared bands from Landsat satellites to accurately distinguish corn and soybeans during the growing season.

The advancement, published in Remote Sensing of Environment, is a breakthrough because, previously, national corn and soybean acreages were only made available to the public four to six months after harvest by the USDA. The lag meant policy decisions were based on stale data. But the new technique can distinguish the two major crops with 95 percent accuracy by the end of July for each field - just two or three months after planting and well before harvest.

The researchers argue more timely estimates of crop areas could be used for a variety of monitoring and decision-making applications, including crop insurance, land rental, supply-chain logistics, commodity markets, and more.

[...] The article, "A high-performance and in-season classification system of field-level crop types using time-series Landsat data and a machine learning approach," is published in Remote Sensing of Environment [DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2018.02.045]. Additional authors include Christopher Seifert, Brian Wardlow, and Zhan Li.


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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday April 09 2018, @11:40AM (1 child)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday April 09 2018, @11:40AM (#664364)

    > "who could have told these people"

    Presumably this is commercially sensitive information, both for the seed producers and the farmers. Should the seed producers really share this information?

    > "Way back in the Cold War"

    Yes, but in the Cold War all the processing had to be done manually. Now they can get a computer to do it due to improved CPU speeds and digital photography. So the thing can be done by a couple of university researchers, rather than an army of data analysts.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 09 2018, @12:13PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 09 2018, @12:13PM (#664374) Journal

    Actually, most of the seed is sold through farmer's coops. The coop has no commercial interest in hiding, or masking that information. In fact, the data is already supplied to the various state colleges and universities.