The Coronavirus pandemic has impacted most human life aspects. In the latest months, NASA has launched research projects targeted on how mankind’s reaction to the pandemic has impacted our environment, such as the way air quality has developed in the wake of decreased vehicular traffic in most places. However, the pandemic tentacles extend well past that.
What impacts has production disruptions brought to agriculture and food supply? What about our capability to predict the availability of water in the forthcoming months? How alterations in activity levels impacted the conditions of the environment.
Earth Science Division of NASA, in recent times, selected three novel projects that intend to respond to these and other questions in regards to the pandemic for Rapid Response and Novel Research (RRNES) awards. RRNES is financing quick-turnaround ventures that make inventive use of the group’s resources and statistics to better realize regional to world environmental, financial, and societal effects of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Food Provision Monitoring
Lockdowns in reaction to Coronavirus left most farmers facing two different; shortages of labor brought about by the restrictions of traveling, and decreasing demand effecting from the massive schools and restaurant shutdowns. Understanding that their costs of labor would surpass the value of their crop, several farmers opted to relinquish harvesting them.
The effects do not end there as the financial downturn, and similar unemployment place food security in jeopardy for most people, particularly in developing nations. Import and export constraints, Coronavirus outbreaks in and within port towns, and other disruptions of supply chains have all supplemented to uncertainty in agricultural markets. To scrutinize the growth of crop forms globally, these aspects and others must be considered.
Michael Humber, who is a scientist from the University of Maryland and also NASA Harvest, together with his associates are operating on a project that gets all of the pertinent Earth Science statistics altogether in one accessible place. Conformity with NASA’s mission of food security target program, NASA Harvest is attempting to enlarge open admittance to agricultural data that can assist in informing food strategy decisions.
Humber confirmed that they aim to offer interactive, web mapping equipment that will demonstrate them, in just a few ticks, the national and international market condition and main food-crop assessments backed with remote-sensing statistics. He added that one would be able to merge the data with the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus tracker data and the recent updates about the pandemic.
