Abstract
Faculty, students, and staff from eight universities in the U.S. Northern Great Plains formed the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium (UMAC ) to lead a regional transition to sustainability . One major focus was on agriculture, an important part of the region’s economy and social structure. By forming a learning community in concert with farmers and ranchers, UMAC has made information an asset as valuable as land, labor, and capital. One primary source of information combined with traditional sources is remotely sensed imagery. UMAC has created an end-to-end operation, starting with data acquisition by airborne and orbiting sensors customized to acquire data needed to meet producer demands, proceeding to development of value-added products, and finally making them readily accessible on the WWW to non-expert users whom we also train. A specific example of the operation in action illustrates the economic and environmental benefits that result.
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Acknowledgements
The work of the Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium has been partially funded by a series of grants from NASA. The authors are reporting the work of a much larger team, without whose contributions there would have been little to report. The list is too long to name each one, and naming only a few would be unfair to the others. Special note should be made of contributions by exceptional farmers and ranchers whose commitment to tackling some pressing global challenges is a source of hope for everyone wanting a better world for posterity.
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Seielstad, G.A., Clay, D.E., Dalsted, K., Lawrence, R.L., Olsen, D.R., Zhang, X. (2010). Providing Precision Crop and Range Protection in the US Northern Great Plains. In: Oerke, EC., Gerhards, R., Menz, G., Sikora, R. (eds) Precision Crop Protection - the Challenge and Use of Heterogeneity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9277-9_23
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