The new USDA NASS Geography Graduate Fellowship, whereby a UMD Geography graduate student performs research on-site at the USDA NASS office in Fairfax, Virginia, recently completed its first semester. This program was developed in Spring 2007 by Mr. Rick Mueller, head of the Spatial Analysis Research Section of USDA NASS, Dr. Chris Justice and Ms. Jessica McCarty of the Department of Geography at the University of Maryland. Funding for this fellowship is provided from a contract between the USDA NASS and UMD. Currently, M.A. student Mary Lindsey is the residing fellow at USDA NASS, which provides for tuition, stipend, travel expenses, and benefits. In fall 2007, Mary completed training as a USDA NASS remote sensing analyst and successfully used her programming skills to modify existing USDA NASS scripts into batch processes. As a NASS on-site fellow, Mary has been able to interact with visiting scientists from Brazil, attend USDA-sponsored lecture series, and participate in conferences, including the ESRI Federal Users Conference. Currently, Mary is completing the agricultural land use mapping of California with guidance from Rick Mueller and will be presenting the results at the 2008 Annual Association of American Geographers Meeting in Boston. The title of her presentation is Agricultural Land-Use Classification for California Using AWiFS and MODIS Data. She is also investigating the efficacy of using Clark Lab's Land Change Modeler for ArcGIS to identify and remove areas of the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset that have been converted from agriculture to another land use from the annual USDA NASS crop type classifications.

“The NASS/UMD Geography Fellowship provides an excellent opportunity for our students to gain insight and hands-on experience on how the national agricultural statistics are generated and to help the operational program benefit from the advances in geographic information science developed in our department and in the broader research community.” Dr. Chris Justice (Geography Professor).

“Mary has become a real asset to NASS, as she came to us new to the field of GIS and remote sensing, but highly technically skilled in the IT field. She has accomplished an extraordinary amount of learning during her tenure both in the classroom and in our shop and now Mary is a valued staff member who is contributing remote sensing analysis for our program and assisting NASS staff with her IT programming talents. We are looking forward to the summer months, when we will be leveraging Mary’s talents to assist us in setting real-time remote sensing based acreage estimates during the growing season by mapping the major corn, soybean and wheat growing regions of the US.” Mr. Rick Mueller (Head of Spatial Analysis Research Section of USDA NASS).

Mr. Rick Mueller and MA student Mary Lindsey at the USDA NASS offices in Fairfax, Virginia.