AlyssaÌýWhitcraft

  • DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHICAL SCIENCES | UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Faculty member smiling with body of water in background

Alyssa Whitcraft's passion for agriculture stems her family’s viticulture business, a background in development economics, and a long-standing interest in understanding food-culture connections. Her training in geography turned her attention toward remote sensing and geospatial methodologies, and showed the importance of spatial thinking in global problem-solving.

Her research focuses on agriculture and the monitoring and mapping of agricultural characteristics and processes worldwide. She has spent most of her career leading efforts to define Earth observations data requirements forÌýglobal agricultural monitoring, and working with space agencies throughÌýÌýin order to increase acquisition of, availability and continuity of, and access to consistently pre-processed satellite data sets for agriculture. She is the agriculture point of contact for the CEOS and lead ofÌý'sÌýEarth observation data coordination activity.

She is the founding Executive Director of ÌýandÌýthe former and co-founding Deputy Director forÌý. Affiliated with both NASA programs, and also directs the (SARA) Initiative.

Education

  • Geographical Sciences; University of Maryland, College Park 2014 - PhD
  • Geography/Environmental Studies & International Development Studies (double major); University of California, Los Angeles 2007 - BA

Areas of Interest

  • Agriculture
  • Remote Sensing
  • Sustainability
  • Data privacy
  • Secure computation
  • Public Private Partnerships
  • Policy
  • Viticulture
  • Climate change adaptation and resilience

Research Topics

  • Carbon, Vegetation Dynamics and Landscape-Scale Processes
  • Geospatial Information Science and Remote Sensing
  • Human Dimensions of Global Change - Coupled Human and Natural Systems
  • Land Cover - Land Use Change
  • Remote Sensing