Research

Precision Agriculture


Meeting product-specific crop quality and quantity targets while limiting adverse impacts on the environment is one of the primary challenges facing growers across the world. Frequent monitoring of cropland is necessary to address target problem areas and predict potential yield metrics affecting the supply chain. Remote sensing imagery can provide key radiometric information indicative of a crop’s performance. In fact, models based on satellite and airborne remote sensing imagery have been developed for many cash crops. With the recent arrival of accessible unmanned aerial system (UAS) imaging technology, many studies have begun exploring high-resolution in-field mapping because of the potential to exploit variable rate applications of crop inputs. The primary advantage of a UAS platform is the potential for farmers to inexpensively own a small UAS system that they can operate to monitor their own fields. To reach this goal a number of challenges exist, chiefly obtaining a generalized model for the relevant crop and agronomic target of interest.

Planetary Rings

Why study planetary rings?

  1. Rings are a natural probe of their environment. Properties of the planet, moons, and the magnetic field can be revealed by analyzing their effects on the rings.

  2. The evolving planet-moon system can be greatly affected by the presence of the rings.

  3. Rings are a common feature of the giant planets in our solar system, and possibly around giant exoplanets. Studying the fine scale structure of these systems can reveal the mechanisms of the rings' origin and evolution and thus planetary formation.

  4. Rings are an accessible and small scale analog to other astrophysical disks; proto-planetary disks, circum-stellar disks, and disk galaxies.

  5. Rings have recently been discovered around the centaur Chariklo (a small asteroid/comet like object in an eccentric orbit between Saturn and Uranus) and the Kuiper belt object Haumea. Under what conditions will we find rings around other small solar system bodies?

See subpages for my work with individual ring systems: