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Jan 26

Sneak Peek: Remote Sensing in Commercial Agriculture: Perspective on Innovations

Dr. Christopher Lund is a research scientist and product manager for METER’s new irrigation management instrumentation group. He has more than a decade of experience working with land surface flux measurements, terrestrial water budgets, and soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer scheme modeling. Prior to joining METER, he served as a research scientist on the NASA-CSUMB SIMS (Satellite Irrigation Management Support) Project, a multi-year collaboration between the California Department of Water Resources, NASA, and CSU Monterey Bay providing California growers with novel irrigation decision support tools. Dr. Lund’s current research focuses on developing cost-effective irrigation management instrumentation for commercial markets. Dr. Lund will be giving a talk on innovations in agricultural remote sensing at the Third Professional Workshop on Technology For Irrigation Scheduling.  He will talk about his work with the SIMS team and what growers can do with remote sensing data to estimate things like evapotranspiration.  He’ll also address how to improve those estimates by combining them with field measurements from ground based instrumentation such as soil moisture sensors.

remote sensing in commercial agriculture

Image: USGS Landsat Project Website

“The advantage of satellite remote sensing is that it allows you to look at many fields at once and also integrate across spatial variability.  The down side is it doesn’t give you access to everything you might want for irrigation management, so there are certain things you have to measure on the ground.  When it comes to remote sensing data and ground measurements, I don’t think it’s an either/or situation.  I think the future is hybrid products utilizing both remote sensing and ground based measurements,” he says.

He will also speak on how satellite derived NDVI data can benefit from new inexpensive ground based-sensors like the SRS.  This enables scientists to make sure that their satellite NDVI data accurately reflect what’s happening on the ground.

The seminar will be held at the Third Professional Workshop On Technology For Irrigation Scheduling on February 11, 2015 at the CREA auditorium, Calle Jose Galan Merino Sevilla, Spain.

Download the “Researcher’s complete guide to soil moisture”—>

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Jan 19

Modeling Available Soil Moisture

Both the amount and the availability of water in soil is important to plant roots and soil-dwelling organisms. To describe the amount of water in the soil we use the term water content. To describe the availability we talk of water potential. In thermodynamics, the water content would be referred to as the extensive variable and the water potential as the intensive variable. Both are needed to correctly describe the state of water in soil and plants.

Measuring soil moisture with the WP4C

Measuring soil moisture with the WP4C

In addition to describing the state of water in the soil, it may also be necessary to know how fast water will move in the soil. For this, we need to know the hydraulic conductivity. Other important soil parameters are the total pore space, the drained upper limit for soil water, and the lower limit of available water in a soil. Since these properties vary widely among soils, it would be helpful to establish correlations between these very useful parameters and easily measured properties such as soil texture and bulk density. This paper will present the information needed for simple models of soil water processes.

Click here to download the paper.

Download the “Researcher’s complete guide to water potential”—>

Download the “Researcher’s complete guide to soil moisture”—>

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Jan 12

The Spirit of the Grant Harris Fellowship

The Grant Harris Fellowship was conceived in 2009 by  METER‘s (formerly Decagon Devices) marketing group as an opportunity for METER to give back to the science community.  The idea was to create a partnership between METER and researchers so that we could provide instrumentation and be a kind of “scientific friend” to graduate students: giving them experience crafting a proposal, reviewing their ideas, offering feedback, and encouraging those projects that seemed the most promising and exciting to us as scientists.

Grant Harris fellowship

Grant Harris standing in the doorway of METER’s first office in 1987.

When we thought about this opportunity we wondered…who would we name this fellowship after? It was an easy decision when we realized that the principles upon which METER is based come from academia through our founder, retired soil science professor Gaylon Campbell and his father-in-law, Grant Harris, who was a professor and department head of Rangeland Ecology at Washington State University.

Grant Harris fellowship

He lived in a tiny outpost of a house, taking care of sheep-grazing rangeland in a high alpine meadow area, far removed from civilization.

Grant Harris started his career at the beginning of the depression, so when he got married he quickly needed to find a way to support his growing family.  At that time in history, there was not as much college funding or support.  Instead of having the opportunity to attend graduate school, Dr. Harris was forced to start work immediately after obtaining his B.S. for the U.S. Forest Service, managing rangeland in Montana. He lived in a tiny outpost of a house, taking care of sheep-grazing rangeland in a high alpine meadow area, far removed from civilization.

“Scientific Instrumentation has made a lot of progress since I was first exposed to research, working at the Desert Range Experiment Station in 1935 as an undergraduate at Utah State University.  Back then research was 3 parts wits, 6 parts labor, and 1 part instrumentation. I still remember in 1939 measuring the absorption of water into the soil profile using old whisky bottles and corks.

It is amazing to see the time and labor saving devices now available.  We are proud of Decagon’s heritage in producing instrumentation for soil physics.” – Grant Harris

It was only later, after five years of service in the U.S. Navy during WWII, that he finally got the chance to further his education. He returned to school to earn an M.S. and a PhD, and because of his difficult path in obtaining those degrees, he placed a high value on education and an even greater value on the providing of opportunities for research.

Grant Harris fellowship

He placed a high value on education and an even greater value on the providing of opportunities for research.

During his career, Dr. Harris was able to reach out and touch the lives of many students, not only in the U.S. but from all over the world.  He spent time in other countries researching and helping to provide basic science to people throughout his career as a rangeland ecologist.  The Grant Harris Fellowship provides that same learning opportunity for graduate students today where, in the spirit of this legacy that Grant Harris provided, we continue his passion for encouraging research in a direction that will help us understand more about the natural environment.

Colin Campbell, Decagon’s VP of Research and Development commented on the “Spirit of Grant Harris,” during a recent interview.  “As we thought about this opportunity to give back to the research community, we thought of my grandpa, who had a great passion for providing people the chance to learn and grow through the beauty of science.  Thus the objective of the Harris Fellowship is to provide student researchers additional opportunities to dream up new ways of doing things that are going to be successful and also to provide support to those researchers so they can accomplish their goals.”

Click here to learn more about how to apply for the annual Grant Harris Fellowship

Get more information on applied environmental research in our

Download the “Researcher’s complete guide to soil moisture”—>

Jan 5

Do Funding Agencies Favor Collaboration?

It’s an interesting question, and certainly one scientists need to think about. In a recent conversation a science colleague said, “I think in science right now, all the funding agencies are recognizing that to answer the problems that matter, you need to bring in people from different disciplines and even industry. If you look at the major funding focus of the National Science Foundation, when they consider bio-complexity, they’re not looking for a group of people with the same perspective. Science questions are becoming more complex, so you need to get input from people with varied backgrounds.”

funding

R.J. Cook Agronomy Farm at WSU (http://css.wsu.edu/facilities/cook/)

Examples of this are two projects that METER has collaborated on recently: the Specialty Crops Research Initiative – Managing Irrigation and Nutrients via Distributed Sensing (SCRI- MINDS) and the WSU Cook Farm project, both of which were able to get funding based in part on the use of METER’s technology, and both had a high-level of multidisciplinary involvement.

We got involved in the Cook Farm Project seven years ago because another scientist and I had an idea that fit in the context of a hot topic of the time which was to create a wireless sensor network that was densely populated in a relatively small area.  We did this because at that time, scientists were recognizing that many of the processes they were interested in were occurring when they were not out in the field measuring. In order to understand these processes, we needed in situ measurements collected continuously over a long period of time.

What we were trying to do is show that you could create a wireless sensor network in a star pattern, where you have a central point collecting data from a host of nodes surrounding it.  Our questions were:  can we create a sustainable star network in the field to get consistent and continuous measurements over several seasons, while densely populating the study area with sensors? The measurement network that we designed allowed us to investigate how topography, slope, and aspect interact to determine the hydrology of the soil in this intensely managed agronomic field.

Decagon collaborated with scientists at Washington State University, working with twelve sites across a 37-hectare field.  We installed five ECH2O-TE (now 5TE) sensors at 30, 60, 90, 120, and 150 cm below the soil surface.

funding

Wheat field

What we learned was that when wheat plants grow, their roots follow the water down a lot deeper than you might imagine.  We observed considerable water loss even 150 cm below the soil surface. Data on soil water potential suggested that, as water was depleted to the point where it was not easily extractable, plant roots at a given level would move deeper into the soil where water was more easily accessible. Soil morphology also came into play as hardpans occurred at several measurement locations and water uptake from layers above and below them showed amazing differences.

It was a really exciting thing scientifically, but also technologically.  We learned that the star network was easily possible.  It ran autonomously and was very successful, in spite of the fact that the cell phone we used to get the data back to the office never worked very well.

So it was the science question and the technology question together that was able to secure the funding.  With those twelve sites WSU was able to secure a grant from the USDA for 4.2 million dollars and the research is still ongoing today.  In fact, recently Cook Farm was established as one of the National long-term agroecosystem research sites (LTAR) which will help continue this kind of research well into the future.

Download the “Researcher’s complete guide to water potential”—>

Download the “Researcher’s complete guide to soil moisture”—>

Get more information on applied environmental research in our