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NASA Space Apps 2026

Field Shift

A farmer-facing look at multi-year rotation options for Story County, Iowa, using NASA Earth observations, USDA CDL, and SoilGrids. This tool supports, and does not replace, local agronomic judgment.

Story County tiles

Each square is a 1.2 km analysis tile built from 30 m USDA CDL pixels. Click a tile, or pick a featured one. The map shows 2025 crop groups.

County typical tile

Your priorities

Move the sliders to say what matters on this farm. Scores update immediately. Equal weights are the default.

Rotation strategies compared

At least three options, including the current corn-soy rotation, plus non-dominated sequences from a small NSGA-II search. Ranked for the selected tile and your weights.

Trade-off table

Pareto front

Each point is a 4-year sequence on the selected tile. X is water demand, Y is erosion risk (lower is better on both axes). Gold points are named strategies. Green points are other non-dominated NSGA-II options.

NASA POWER climate context (county center)

Growing-season (Apr–Sep) precipitation and growing degree days at 42.035°N, 93.465°W, 2000–2024. Planning indicators use the median of the last ten years, not a weather forecast.

What each number means

Cover-crop “+cover” years assume a winter rye that shrinks bare-soil months and uses a little extra water. That assumption is documented, not observed as a CDL class. SMAP, ECOSTRESS, GPM IMERG and GRACE are named in the challenge and are not in this local demo because they need an Earthdata login.

Next-season crop, test years 2024–2025

Persistence is weak because Story County already alternates corn and soy. The practical bar is the 2nd-order Markov table. LightGBM is useful when it improves calibration and rare classes, not just headline accuracy.

Feature-group ablation

Calibration (temperature scaling on 2022–2023)

Confusion matrix and reliability diagram Baseline versus LightGBM ablation bars

County maps (local run)

CDL history 2016, 2020, 2025 from the local Story County run NASADEM slope and analysis tiles from the local Story County run

Colab Full-County Run (2024–25)

A larger personal-Colab CPU run on the same Story County AOI and the same temporal split (train through 2021, validation 2022–2023, test 2024–2025). Seed 0, 25 Optuna trials, 400,000 sampled pixels (266,664 / 66,666 / 66,666), plus a 2025 full-county map over about 1.50 million farmed pixels. Shown here as evidence alongside the local Story County run above, not as a replacement for it. Both runs are labeled one seed, not a published benchmark.

Baselines vs LightGBM (Colab test years)

Feature-group ablation (Colab)

Colab baselines versus LightGBM feature-group ablation. One seed, not a published benchmark.

Confusion and calibration (Colab)

Colab LightGBM confusion matrix and reliability diagram, test years 2024–2025. Temperature scaling T=0.90 slightly worsened ECE.

2025 full-county map (Colab)

Held-out year 2025: USDA CDL actual, LightGBM prediction from history + soil + climate + NDVI, and disagreement (30.2% of farmed pixels). Pixel accuracy over 1,495,561 farmed pixels is 0.811. One seed, not a published benchmark.

Story County 2025 CDL actual versus predicted next-season crop and disagreement map from the Colab full-county run

Data and software

    Original software in this folder is licensed under Apache License 2.0. All sources are cited above. Builds on our earlier code and open-source libraries. One seed, not a published benchmark.