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Meha Jain

Assistant Professor Dr. Meha Jain during Fast Food for Thought presentation
Associate Professor
Geospatial Data Sciences
Food Systems
mehajain@umich.edu
734-764-5707
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Office
3540 Dana
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About

Asociate Professor Jain's research examines the impacts of environmental change on agricultural production, and strategies that farmers may adopt to reduce negative impacts. She does this by combining remote sensing and geospatial analyses with household-level and census datasets to examine farmer decision-making and behavior across large spatial and temporal scales. To date her work has focused on the impacts of weather variability and groundwater depletion on agricultural production in India, and whether farmers are able to adapt their cropping practices to mitigate these impacts.

Publications

Jain, M., R. Fishman, P. Mondal, G.L. Galford, N. Bhattarai, S. Naeem, U. Lall, B. Singh, R.S. DeFries (2021). Groundwater depletion will reduce cropping intensity in India. Science Advances. 7 (9): eabd2849

Ricciardi, V., A. Wane, B.S. Sidhu, C. Goode, D. Solomon, E. McCullough, F. Diekmann, J. Porciello, M. Jain, N. Randall, Z. Mehrabi (2020). A scoping review of research funding for small-scale farmers in water scarce regions. Nature Sustainability. 3: 836-844.

Jain, M., D. Solomon, H. Capnerhurst, A. Arnold, A. Elliott, A. Kinzer, C. Knauss, M. Peters, B. Rolf, A. Weil, C. Weinstein (2020). How much can sustainable intensification increase yields across South Asia? A systematic review of the evidence. Environmental Research Letters. 15: 083004

Jain, M. (2020). The Benefits and Pitfalls of Using Satellite Data for Causal Inference. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. 14(1). 157-169.

Jain, M., B. Singh, P. Rao, A.K. Srivastava, S. Poonia, J. Blesh, G. Azzari, A.J. McDonald, D.B. Lobell (2019). The impacts of agricultural interventions can be doubled by using satellite data. Nature Sustainability. 2, 931-934.

Read more publications here.

Research
  • 2021-23: (PI) NASA Commercial SmallSat Data Analysis Program ($183,278)
  • 2021-24: (PI) NASA Land Use Land Cover Change (LCLUC) Program ($448,693)
  • 2017-21: (PI) NASA Land Use Land Cover Change (LCLUC) Program ($751,707)
  • 2016-19: (PI) NASA New Investigator Program (NIP) in Earth Sciences. ($262,612)
  • 2014-18: (PI) National Science Foundation Sustainability Postdoctoral Fellowship (SEES; $487,020). 
Education

PhD, Columbia University (ecology, evolutionary and environmental biology)

BA, Princeton University (ecology and evolutionary biology)

In the News
Future of Big Data
News date
May 22, 2023

Meet the Future: Big Data and Sustainability Solutions

Thanks to the digital revolution, a burgeoning amount of big data is available in real-time on a mass scale. Big data offers scientists unparalleled access to vast amounts of raw information that can be harvested, analyzed and translated into new solutions to the world’s most challenging problems—including sustainability and climate change. We spoke to four SEAS professors about how they are using big data to reimagine sustainability solutions to agriculture, landscape conservation, biological systems and cities.

In the Media