PhD Candidate Kylen Solvik and Assistant Professor Yaffa Truelove were recently awarded a NASA FINESST Grant for Solvik's dissertation research titled "Mapping and Analyzing the Distribution and Drivers of Small Agricultural Reservoirs in Brazil''. The FINESST (Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology) award, part of NASA's Early Career Research Program, will fund interdisciplinary research on the impacts of agricultural expansion and intensification on water in Brazil. Solvik's project aims to understand how patterns of land-use/land-cover change are linked with the creation of small agricultural dams used for cattle drinking water, crop irrigation, and fish aquaculture.
The first stage of the project is to use NASA/USGS Landsat satellite data and AI computer vision methods to automatically identify human-made reservoirs and distinguish them from natural water bodies. Small reservoirs are ubiquitous in Brazilian agriculture, but these will be the first comprehensive maps of very small reservoirs (<0.5 ha), helping analyze this under-studied impact of agriculture on water in the region. The spatial distribution of reservoirs over time will be modeled over time in relation to land-use/land-cover change using existing data from MapBiomas Brasil.
The machine learning and remote sensing part of the research will be paired with qualitative interviews with farmers and ranchers in eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil about water use and management, particularly in response to climate change. Due to climate change, the rainy season that much of Brazil's agriculture depends on is becoming shorter and less predictable, driving farmers to rely more on reservoirs to store and access water. The potential impacts of these changes are not well understood. By combining both remote sensing and qualitative field interviews, this project will help researchers, policy-makers, and water users more fully understand the past, present, and future impacts of agriculture on surface water in Brazil.
