Dr. Stephanie Yarwood and her colleagues will use satellite data to understand nitrogen emissions from agricultural land
Image Credit: Edwin Remsberg
NASA awarded nearly $1.1M to a multi-institutional team including University of Maryland’s Associate Professor Stephanie Yarwood to study the relationship between farming practices and nitrogen emissions to the atmosphere. Various conservation practices are known to help reduce nitrogen emissions from farmlands, but the real-world effects of those practices on the atmosphere has been limited, in part because the right data hasn’t been available.
Compared to metropolitan areas of the country, air quality measurements over agricultural regions are sparse. But with funding from NASA, Yarwood and her colleagues will be filling in the gaps with satellite data to answer questions about how what happens on farms affects nitrogen compounds in Earth’s atmosphere.
“I’m really excited about this project,” said Yarwood, who is in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology. “It’s interesting for me as a microbial ecologist who often thinks in scales no bigger than a shovel full of soil to be involved in these projects with collaborators that work on much larger scales and think of large, atmospheric effects.”
Farm animal waste and fertilizers in the soil are primary contributors of nitrogen to the atmospheric pollutant ammonia (NH3) and ozone-depleting nitrogen oxides (NOX) that cause global warming. Using satellite data, the scientists will identify “hot spots” above farmlands and natural areas where levels of ammonia and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere rise, as well as “hot moments,” specific times and conditions in which hot spots occur. They will then assess those hot spots and moments against maps of soil type and information about the landscape to select study areas with similar characteristics where farming practices differ.
