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Wednesday, November 4, 2009: 1:45 PM
Convention Center, Room 337-338, Third Floor
Abstract:
The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has produced in-season acreage estimates via the Cropland Data Layer (CDL) program since 2007 providing timely annual geospatial updates of the agricultural landscape in the US Heartland. The CDL program delivers acreage estimates based on regression modeling for decision support and produces a crop-specific geospatial dataset for the public domain. The CDL program has grown incrementally as collaborative partnerships and technological efficiencies have enhanced productivity via re-engineering the classification and estimation processes thus enabling continuous program improvements from legacy applications in the late 1990’s.
The increased emphasis on renewable energy and bioenergy crops, beginning in 2007, highlighted the need to capture the dynamic agricultural landscape as it is adapts to the challenge of production agriculture meeting the demand of food for fuel. The opportunity to accurately classify and estimate bioenergy acreage provided an ever present CDL challenge. Working in cooperation with the US Department of Energy/Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) presented an opportunity for resource exchanges to provide additional ground truth for nontraditional crops such as switchgrass to determine if the CDL could correctly identify and classify this landcover type.
The 2008 CDL of Kentucky utilized traditional CDL methods, including satellite imagery collections from Resourcesat-1 AWiFS in combination with ground truth provided by the Farm Service Agency Common Land Unit program and switchgrass fields provided by ORNL, to perform a supervised landcover classification of the agricultural landscape of Kentucky. The goal of performing the classification was to identify, with a high degree of accuracy, both traditional and nontraditional crops. Collaborative efforts such as this are necessary to both monitor and adapt to the changing agricultural landscape where nontraditional crops today, may be considered commonplace in the near bioenergy centric future.
The increased emphasis on renewable energy and bioenergy crops, beginning in 2007, highlighted the need to capture the dynamic agricultural landscape as it is adapts to the challenge of production agriculture meeting the demand of food for fuel. The opportunity to accurately classify and estimate bioenergy acreage provided an ever present CDL challenge. Working in cooperation with the US Department of Energy/Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) presented an opportunity for resource exchanges to provide additional ground truth for nontraditional crops such as switchgrass to determine if the CDL could correctly identify and classify this landcover type.
The 2008 CDL of Kentucky utilized traditional CDL methods, including satellite imagery collections from Resourcesat-1 AWiFS in combination with ground truth provided by the Farm Service Agency Common Land Unit program and switchgrass fields provided by ORNL, to perform a supervised landcover classification of the agricultural landscape of Kentucky. The goal of performing the classification was to identify, with a high degree of accuracy, both traditional and nontraditional crops. Collaborative efforts such as this are necessary to both monitor and adapt to the changing agricultural landscape where nontraditional crops today, may be considered commonplace in the near bioenergy centric future.