On June 30, 2008, a map made by UMD Geography graduate student and USDA NASS Fellow Mary Lindsey was included in the official USDA Acreage Report briefing given by Carol House, chair of NASS’s Agricultural Statistics Board, to the Secretary of Agriculture, Ed Schafer. The Acreage Report, based on survey data collected in early June, sets the USDA estimates of acres planted for all the major crop commodities for the current year. The report's release and associated briefing is eagerly anticipated by those in the agricultural and financial industries. This was especially true this year as six major corn and soybean states were hit with extensive flooding during and immediately after the collection of the June survey data.

To help the Statistics Board understand the impacts of the flooding, Mary and other NASS analysts generated maps displaying MODIS and AWiFS imagery showing the extent of flooding, and combined them with geospatial data such as June survey data collection locations, elevation, and precipitation. They also made quantitative assessments of the percent of agricultural lands flooded in each state. Mary's map of the total rainfall for the first 15 days of June (shown here with the survey locations removed) was used in the briefing to highlight the counties and survey locations most likely to be saturated, and was additionally used in an analysis indicating that the farmers the USDA could not get in contact with were not clustered in areas with the worst flooding. The results of the analysis were also included in the Acreage Report.