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Topics included agriculture, invasive carp, land cover, urban heat islands, additions to the remote sensing archive at EROS, fire ecology, climate and water change, all showing potential benefits from remote sensing science. Study areas ranged from Mongolia to South Dakota, where the EROS (short for Earth Resources Observation and Science) Center is located.

“These sessions are a very effective way to connect with the next generation of scientists and engineers,” said EROS Director Pete Doucette, who perused posters and enjoyed chatting with students at the November 13, 2024, session. “It’s gratifying to see our commitment to cultivating a talent pipeline for the Earth observation sciences.”

Some students and EROS staff at the poster session also participated in an Eyes on Earth podcast episode. Listen here or on the webpage:

South Dakota Science

Many of the student posters featured South Dakota-related topics, with some students conducting on-the-ground research in tandem with remote sensing. For example, Brenden Elwer of South Dakota State University (SDSU) collected data to identify food sources for bighead and silver carp: chlorophyll-A and zooplankton density. He is seeking to pinpoint the most attractive habitat for the invasive species in the state by pairing his ground data with Landsat Surface Reflectance data available from EROS, home of the Landsat archive.

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If fish and wildlife managers know the best invasive carp habitat, they can focus efforts to prevent their spread. “Carp are relatively new to this region, very limited in their range,” Elwer said. “We want to keep them where they’re at because of their negative impacts on native species like the walleye, the perch and even, potentially, waterfowl populations by competing for food.”

Fellow SDSU master’s student Natalie Liberati also focused on invasive carp, but from a different perspective. Her research tracked lakes and wetlands near the James River watershed in southeast South Dakota to see where carp could potentially migrate between waterbodies during flooding, using a Level 3 Landsat data product available from EROS called Dynamic Surface Water Extent, or DSWE. 

The project has a personal aspect for Liberati. “I just wanted to focus my research and maybe future career on invasive species to try to deter them or stop them from moving everywhere because I love fishing,” she said. 

Many other posters with South Dakota-based studies focused on agriculture:

• Sakshi Saraf, University of South Dakota (USD): “Mapping of invasive yellow sweetclover across western South Dakota for 2016-2023”
• Khushboo Jain, USD: “Quantifying the impact of sustainable agriculture management practices on soil health and greenhouse gas emissions in eastern South Dakota”
• Ubaid ur Rehman Janjua, SDSU: “Assimilation of UAS Remote Sensing and Deep Learning-Derived Crop Parameters into DSSAT Model for Grain Yield Prediction”
• Hillson Ghimire, SDSU: “Wheat Head Detection from Close-range Digital Imagery using Deep Learning”
• Belinda Apili, SDSU: “Remote Sensing - Based Mapping and Analysis of Winter Cover Crop Adoption for Sustainable Agriculture in Minnehaha County”
• Muhammad Ali Irshad, SDSU: “Multiscale Remote Sensing Data Fusion for Crop Canopy Cover Mapping using Deep Learning”
• Kushal Poudel, SDSU: “Wheat Growth Stages Detection using UAS Multispectral Imagery and Machine Learning”
• Madison DeJarlais, SDSU: “Preliminary Time-Series Analysis of Surface Water Change in the Prairie Pothole Region”
• Mohammad Maruf Billah, SDSU: “Multiyear crop yield and quality estimation using UAS remote sensing and deep transfer learning”
• Krishna Phanindra Marupaka and Deepika Nuthalapati, USD: “Multi-Level Spatiotemporal Vision Transformer for Analyzing Climate Impact in South Dakota”

The remaining posters covered locations in Asia and the United States on topics from biomass and canopy cover to surface moisture and slum detection:

• Venkatesh Kolluru, USD: “Harnessing the potential of drone imagery and Sentinel-2 data for cross-scale mapping of above-ground biomass and canopy cover across Mongolia and Kazakhstan”
• Abhinav Chandel, USD: “Developing 30m aboveground biomass and canopy cover estimates for Mongolia from 1990-2023”
• Lina Ndekelu, SDSU: “A time series deep learning algorithm for high spatial resolution soil moisture retrieval from Sentinel-1 data”
• Soubhoon Sadeq Shinjini, SDSU: “Slum Area Detection in Dhaka City, Bangladesh, Using Satellite Remote Sensing and Deep Learning”

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Tapping into EROS Experience

EROS employees gave a warm welcome to student researchers and fielded a strong showing of their own, representing about half of the posters at the event. Students got a glimpse of the impressive breadth of work at the center, including science, data management and engineering projects. 

Lei Ji, a senior scientist for the ASRC contract at EROS, presented his poster about historical agricultural water use in the United States. “Traditionally, the estimation of groundwater is based on reports, surveys that are received from farmers. Data is collected and compiled by a government agency. … The whole process is very time- and cost-consuming,” he said. 

Ji’s map, created using remote sensing, identifies trends in water consumption over time using “blue water” evapotranspiration (ET), which is just shorthand for water that evaporates and transpires from plants grown as crops. (See the full list of EROS posters below.)

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In addition to learning about EROS science, students got direct feedback about their own posters from staff members. For example, Madison DeJarlais of SDSU talked with Jesslyn Brown, project manager for the Annual National Land Cover Database (NLCD), and Kristi Sayler, a supervisory physical scientist for a science team at EROS. They asked DeJarlais detailed questions about next steps into her research of wetlands in the prairie potholes region, which focuses on Landsat data from two years: 1984 and 2023.

“We see these pulses with water in NLCD mapping,” Brown said. “It’s fairly stable, but then there’s these wet years, drier years, mins and maxes, and so if you pick two years, then your trend might be funky.”

“The next step will be year to year and seeing that overall trend rather than endpoints, for sure,” DeJarlais said.

“You might try looking at the DSWE data, too, because that can maybe correlate some of the open water,” Sayler suggested.

After reviewing the science, Brown turned to recruitment: “Are you planning to work in remote sensing after school?”

“I want to work here,” DeJarlais said. “This is my dream job, 100%.”

“We always like to hear that,” Brown said. 

Posters from EROS Staff

Here’s an overview of the posters EROS staff members shared with each other and students. Some of them offered scientists a chance to debut their research before presenting them at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Annual Meeting on December 9, 2024.

• Jeff Clauson, “Understanding and Quantifying the Capability of Remote Sensing Systems” and  “Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation (JACIE)”
• Jeff Clauson, “Understanding and Quantifying the Capability of Remote Sensing Systems” and  “Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation (JACIE)” 
• Hua Shi, George Xian, Christopher Barber, Kristi Sayler, and Zhouting Wu, “Urbanization Related Warming: Addressing Social and Economic Aspects in Land Surface Temperature”
• Kul Khand and Gabriel B. Senay, “Streamflow Predictions by Long Short-Term Memory Networks in Contrasting Water- and Energy-limited Regions”
• Francis K. Dwomoh and Roger F. Auch, “Exploring Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Land Cover and Climate Variability in the Mississippi River Basin”
• Lei Ji, Gabriel Senay, MacKenzie Friedrichs, Stefanie Kagone, “Mapping Historical Agricultural Water Use across the Conterminous United States”
• Tim Smith, “Declass-3 = Another Major World-Wide Imagery Release for 1971-1984 Satellite Acquisitions” and “Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Aerial Film Scanning - Over One Million Frames Released to EarthExplorer”
• Brent Johnson, “Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS)”
• Congcong Li, Suming Jin, “A new framework for aligning Landsat Collection 1 based NLCD land cover products to Collection 2”
• Gabriel Parrish, Gabriel Senay, Stefanie Kagone, Claudia Young, James Rowland, and Michael Budde, “A New Landscape Water Requirement Satisfaction Index for Drought Monitoring and Early Warning in Africa”
• Josephine (Jo) Horton, “Creation of a Land Cover Reference Dataset for Validation of Annual NLCD C1V0”
• Hua Shi, George Xian, Kristi Sayler, and Zhouting Wu, “Performances of remotely sensed surface temperature in measuring surface temperature in urban areas”
• Hazel Mebius, Grace Parrott,  Katelyn Woolfrey, “Using Terrestrial LiDAR to Model Forest Structure Following the KNP Complex Fire”
• Roger Auch and Patrick Danielson, “New USGS Annual NLCD Highlights and Reinforces Conterminous U.S. Land Cover Change Since 1985”