An Educational Program for Engaging Rural Students for Agricultural in situ Data Collection

While the use of remote sensing in agricultural contexts has allowed for improvements of monitoring massive spatial scales and innovative food security methods, it is limited by the lack of in situ observations for validation, especially in rural regions and small-scale farms. As remote sensing and machine learning techniques improve, the need for good relationships between those with the resources for these studies and those these studies benefit is more important than ever. By leveraging relationships with organizations in these regions, rural areas can benefit from the products created and scientists can benefit from the production of ground truth validation. Researchers at the University of Maryland and NASA Harvest have partnered with Bolsa de Cereales in Argentina to train rural students to collect in situ observations using ArcGIS Survey123 and ArcGIS Online. Bolsa de Cereales is an organization that reports on grains in Argentina, and covers yield estimates, domestic prices, and market monitoring. For this project, NASA Harvest and Bolsa de Cereales teamed up to provide training for students in the agricultural region of Buenos Aires in Argentina to both collect points and label fields, and these diverse observations of crop coverage are provided to NASA Harvest to create crop masks at the country scale. Students are given the opportunity to learn about remote sensing, GIS, and machine learning, Bolsa de Cereales has better maps for estimations, and NASA Harvest has improved Argentinian crop monitoring. Most importantly, the next generation of scientists will have an opportunity to learn about modern remote sensing and machine learning techniques. By creating better crop masks for Argentina, the agro-industrial sector and the international grains agricultural markets will be one step forward market transparency, reducing extreme price volatility.