Agriculture
Last modified Wednesday, July 25, 2001

There two main projects in the RESAC agriculture application area at MSU:

  • Digital Atlas Development -- ArcIMS application to provide Internet access to spatial data sets for the full RESAC Upper Midwest region.
  • Regional Crop Productivity Modeling -- An integrated crop and weather modeling visualization system.

Researchers in the Computational Ecology and Visualization Laboratory (CEVL) directed by Dr. Stuart Gage developed the following PowerPoint presentation to highlight recent research results in time-series animation. Click here to:

View Time Series Animations
(requires IE 5.0 or higher for best results)

Digital Atlas Development

Data Layers Under Development

  • Static Database Components
    • County basemap
    • Soil elements
    • Elevation DEM (1 km grid)
    • Ecosystem geography
      • Bailey
      • Omernik
      • Major land resource areas
  • Dynamic Database Components (1972-1998)
    • Crop characteristics
    • Crop elements (annual)
      • Area planted
      • Production
    • Meteorological elements (monthly)
      • Temp
      • Precipitation
      • Radiation
      • HPR

Elevation Map

Elevation Map - Relief

 

 

 

Regional Productivity Modeling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Forestry

Data from the SPOT sensor VEGETATION collected in the summer of 1999 is being used to develop fractional forest cover maps for the entire Upper Midwest Region. We plan to develop an ArcIMS application that displays this data.

 

Fractional cover map of Upper Great Lakes region developed from SPOT 4 VEGETATION data acquired 21 April 1999 (Jiaguo Qi, BSRSI).
Land Use & Land Cover Change

MSU is conducting a Land Use study for the Michigan Department of Transportation as a component of the Final Environmental Impact Statement that the URS Corporation is developing for MDOT. The study looks at past and possible future land use change in the region in relation to the transportation networks, both current and proposed.

Go to: Land Use Study for MDOT US-31 Project

Several innovative tools are being utilized in this work including an air photo browser that can be tested at the link below. (Air Photo browser prototype with two example images):

http://tropic.geo.msu.edu/sid4aps/

To help visualize the land cover change that has already occurred over time, annimations are being prepared for certain parts of the study area. An example of the kind of animation being produced is available at the link below.

http://resac.msu.edu/resac/animation_land_change.html/

 
Water Resources

 

NEW -- Summer 2001

Michigan state University has established a cooperative agreement with the USGS Water Resources Division, Michigan District to apply remote sensing technology to the monitoring of inland lake water clarity for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality's annual assessment program. The program will utilize the Lake Water Protocol designed by our Minnesota and Wisconsin RESAC partners. The end result will be a statewide map of lake water clarity as extrapolated from in situ lake water data (Secci disk measurements). Eventually we hope to combine the statewide maps developed by our partners in Minnesota and Wisconsin to form a regional inland lake water clarity map, possibly on an annual basis. Details to follow.

 

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