Population growth and the unprecedented rate of climate change create a need for rapid agricultural adaptation. Therefore, it is important to answer questions about which agricultural practices are most effective for growing crops under various weather conditions. …

The recent jump in grain prices is another reminder of the importance of having high cropland productivity. Although the Ukraine war has pushed markets over the edge, the underlying conditions were already strained, in part due to weather-driven shortfalls around the world. …

Chances are if you’ve heard about space lasers in the past year, it’s related to conspiracy theories about what was causing so many fires in California. While that’s obviously crazy (to put it kindly), the truth is that there actually are space lasers, and they actually have been shaking things…

Why map crop types? A crop type map is a dataset indicating which crops are growing in each field within a specific geographical region and year. Above is a sketch of a crop type map in Occitanie, France from 2017. Crop type maps are a prerequisite for agricultural monitoring as…

The impacts of climate change are all around us. Wildfire seasons are increasingly severe, hurricane seasons are longer, and coastal flooding is more frequent. A more subtle, but perhaps more pernicious, impact has been the steady and inexorable march upwards in global average temperatures. …

It’s now become a regular topic in our newsfeeds: wildfires are increasing in number, size, and damage every year. Some of the consequences of these fires are obvious but others are less well understood. Our new PNAS paper focuses on the increasingly important contribution of wildfire smoke to overall pollution…

Low quality soils are the source of multiple problems in global smallholder agriculture. A lack of plant essential nutrients — such as nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, boron, and zinc — in the soil directly leads to plant deficiencies and reduced size and nutrient content of the food grains. Additionally, degraded soils…

With today’s computing power and free satellite imagery, generating a crop yield map from satellite data is relatively easy. Knowing if that map is accurate or not, however, can be surprisingly difficult. When ground data is sparse, researchers often evaluate yield maps by comparing regional means against government statistics. Sometimes…

In the United States, farmers planted over 90 million acres of soybean in 2017; in 2018, soybean planted acreage outpaced corn for the first time in decades [1]. …