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New research by Meha Jain, an associate professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), examines the impacts of environmental change on agricultural production and the strategies farmers may adopt to mitigate negative effects.

She says that using high-resolution satellite imagery, combined with new analytical tools, can help governments, policymakers and development organizations better understand where agricultural interventions work, and can allow them to target resources more effectively while building more resilient food systems.

The study, published in Science, is focused on the impacts of weather variability and groundwater depletion on agricultural production in India, and revealing how farmers can adapt their cropping practices to mitigate these impacts. Her work combines remote sensing and geospatial analyses with household-level and census datasets to examine farmer decision-making and behavior. 

“New advances in satellite technology can help support decision-making in traditionally data-scarce systems,” she says. “Many potential solutions already exist; we need to identify ways to increase the adoption of these strategies at scale.”

Read the full press release on the Michigan News website.

Study: Satellite data can help transform food systems (DOI: 10.1126/science.aee1344)