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Truth in the Soil: Using SMAP to Monitor Drought in Southeast US
Southeast U.S. Agriculture - NASA DEVELOP Summer 2016 @ Wise County
Regional climate variability in the southeastern United States is a concern for agricultural and forestry management. Droughts are an important consequence of this variability, affecting the agricultural and forestry sectors’ ability to manage water resources. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Southeast Regional Climate Hub (SERCH) has developed a tool called Lately Identified Geospecific Heightened Threat System (LIGHTS) to provide information for its users that would increase water management efficiency. It identifies and alerts users to changes in drought, temperature, and precipitation patterns. However, LIGHTS lacks soil moisture information, which also affects drought patterns. This project aims to update the current drought monitoring system by incorporating Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) level 3 data as a support layer, by retrieving Standardized Soil Moisture Index (SSI) as a measure and by using Python as the programming language. Ground truth soil moisture data from Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) were collected for validation. As a result, this integration of SMAP data into SERCH LIGHTS will increase the end-user’s water management capabilities in response to drought conditions.
Yaping Xu Wins Award for Louisiana Sea Grant Annual Coastal Connections Competition
March 1, 2018
PhD Candidate, Yaping Xu, was one of twelve graduate students selected as finalists, representing Biological Sciences, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Entomology, Geography and Anthropology, and Oceanography and Coastal Sciences. The annual Coastal Connections Competition is adapted from the Three Minute Thesis (3MT™) competition approach to research communication, developing academic and presentation skills while supporting the development of students’ capacities to effectively explain their research. Each student had three minutes to present a compelling oration on their research topic and its significance with the use of two slides. Yaping was the recipient of a research travel award of $500.
Sources:
Yaping Xu Wins Award for Louisiana Sea Grant Annual Coastal Connections Competition
https://www.lsu.edu/ga/news/2018/03/01-xu.php
Newsroom: Coastal Connections Cultivates Science Communicators
https://www.laseagrant.org/2017/coastal-connections-cultivates/
Harvard University Invited Talk
MAPPING SOIL MOISTURE WITH STATISTICAL AND SPATIAL ANALYSIS METHODS
Source: Center for Geographic Analysis
https://gis.harvard.edu/event/mapping-soil-moisture-statistical-and-spatial-analysis-methods
Date: Wednesday, May 22, 2019, 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Location: CGIS Knafel K252, 1737 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02138
by: Yaping Xu, Louisiana State University
Yaping Xu, an LSU graduate student in the Department of Geography and Anthropology and the first awardee of the Open Access Author Fund
Source: LSU Libraries
News & Notes: Funding available to publish in Open Access journals
https://news.blogs.lib.lsu.edu/2018/04/04/funding-available-to-publish-in-open-access-journals/
LSU Libraries is piloting an Open Access (OA) Author Fund to provide LSU researchers and authors with funds needed to publish their work in fully open access journals that require author fees. The fund, totaling $30,000, will be available over the 2018 calendar year through a rolling process. Faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff on the LSU Baton Rouge campus with limited sources of funding for open access publication charges are encouraged to apply. Applicants are reviewed within 10 business days.
Yaping Xu, an LSU graduate student in the Department of Geography and Anthropology and the first awardee of the Open Access Author Fund, received funding for his article “Standardized Soil Moisture Index for Drought Monitoring Based on Soil Moisture Active Passive Observations and 36 Years of North American Land Data Assimilation System Data: A Case Study in the Southeast United States” in Remote Sensing, an academic journal of Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). Xu shared, “This is an open access journal which has very good reputation in my field. However, I don’t have funding for the publication. I submitted the application to the Open Access Fund, and luckily got the fund.”
2019 Louisiana Remote Sensing &GIS Workshop Student Poster Contest
Source:
LARAGIS
https://larsgis.org/call-for-papers/student-poster-contest/
Brent Yantis, RAC presents the 2019 winners of the Student Poster Contest, Yaping Yu, Theresa Harriford, Kendall Lee, and Coy LeBlanc.
Other Media Coverage/Acknowledgments
Allen Coral Atlas through the years
Allen Coral Atlas Through the years It's time to celebrate our success! 2017 2017 To scope out what was possible, we had two in-person workshops: at Stanford, and then in Hilo. From Ruth to Helen Wed, Dec 6, 2017: "I am very busy - off to Stanford on Friday to develop an invited...
Reef Cover, a coral reef classification for global habitat mapping from remote sensing
by Emma V. Kennedy et al., University of Queensland
In the last 40 years, technological advancements in the field of remote sensing have led to a different approach to reef classification 11.Specifically for scaling habitat mapping from remote ...
Workflow for the Generation of Expert-Derived Training and Validation Data: A View to Global Scale Habitat Mapping
by Chris M. Roelfsema et al., University of Queensland
Our ability to completely and repeatedly map natural environments at a global scale have increased significantly over the past decade. These advances are from delivery of a range of on-line global satellite image archives and global-scale processing capabilities, along with improved spatial and temporal resolution satellite imagery...
Last update: May 22, 2022