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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @01:23PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @01:23PM (#664392)

    To determine which undesirable farming areas need a targetted pestilence in order to make them easier to purchase. Or to place strain on another country's self sufficiency in order to better offer them aid (with strings attached.) Or this could be used to help document an area where the shipped quantity of food doesn't match with the grown quantity of food bringing back the interstate commerce battle of the 1930s or 40s over whether keeping excess crops to feed your own livestock should be taxed as interstate commerce.

    Expect to see the ugly side of Union over this, sooner or later.

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 09 2018, @02:03PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 09 2018, @02:03PM (#664416) Journal

    I never thought of that. But, you're right. What IS the primary purpose of fine grained monitoring, after all? Control - it's always about control. Even at my age, I'm so naive that I kinda assume that the researchers are trying to improve things, somehow.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @02:13PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @02:13PM (#664427)

    Privacy rights for plants! We demand to grow anonymously without being tracked!! After all, we are cash crops.

    • (Score: 1) by redneckmother on Monday April 09 2018, @03:12PM

      by redneckmother (3597) on Monday April 09 2018, @03:12PM (#664477)

      Speaking of "cash crops"... the gubmit has a new tool to locate hemp fields...

      --
      Mas cerveza por favor.