Alabama Agriculture: Using NASA Earth Observations to Assess the Feasibility of Monitoring Water Retention in Winter and Cover Crops

This project leveraged NASA Earth observations, including Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), Landsat 9 OLI-2, Sentinel-2 Multispectral Imager, Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper, and the Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG), to classify and map winter and cover crops, as well as to quantify soil water retention in northwest Alabama. Partnering with Alabama Drought Reach, the project aimed to provide data-driven insights supporting the organization’s mission of improving drought-related decision making and communication with local farmers. At the time, Alabama Drought Reach lacked field-scale data to quantify how cover crops influence soil water retention. In response, this project used satellite remote sensing and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index calculations to classify and map winter and cover crop coverage in northwestern Alabama, a region affected by variable rainfall and drought events. Results indicated that fields using cover crops exhibited higher soil water retention compared to fields without, highlighting the benefits of expanding cover cropping as a drought-resilience strategy. Limitations related to data resolution and seasonal vegetation changes were noted, but overall, the results demonstrated the feasibility of deploying NASA Earth observations for monitoring and calculating the effectiveness of winter and cover crop implementation.