Spatiotemporal Diagnostics of Major Crops's Vulnerability in the Northern High Plains

Agriculture is accounted for 26% of all losses and damages caused by hydrometeorological disasters. However, approximately half of the damages in agriculture sector occurs in crops sub-sector. Additionality, recent conducted studies by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) indicate that agriculture sub-sector is the most sensitive to flood in comparison with other hydrometeorological hazards. With respect to the corn and soybean cultivation in high acreages in the Midwest of USA and several flood events experiences in the last three decades in this area (e.g. 1993, 2008, 2011, and 2019), some studies have been conducted to assess the maize yield vulnerability to floods/excessive water conditions during the growing season in this region. We hypothesized that pre-growing season flood events also may affect crops production and plant growing conditions adversely through the next growing season as well as during-growing season floods. The objective is to determine maize and soybean production influenced by pre-growing flood events by means of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Disaster Vegetation Damage Index (DVDI) comparison in particular dates which are common for beginning the crop growing stages including vegetative and reproductive growth stages. Long-term required data (e.g. crop production, yield, plant condition, dates of beginning growing stages, etc.) has been extracted from US Department of Agriculture-National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA-NASS). The results show that growing season period of time are inevitably impacted by flood event which makes significantly impacts on corn phenotyping and eventually yield.