The Agronaut

About that. But it took around 3 years, so maybe 40+ hours per lecture, to be where I wanted to be.

🆕 Emerging pest management science from our agriculture.gc.ca centre in Lethbridge, Alberta.

How Canada can build a stronger economy by focusing on key sectors Canada must focus on sectors with real strengths to drive innovation and competitiveness: agriculture, forestry, energy and critical minerals.

"Canada must shift from its historically risk-averse, fragmented investment model to a targeted, mission-oriented approach that concentrates on sectors where it holds inherent advantages: agriculture, forestry, energy &critical minerals."
By Burgess Langshaw Power & Maral Niazi👇
tinyurl.com/mr3rfk6z

“Sir, do you have proof of Canadian citizenship?”

Dive.

Quarterly Climate Impacts and Outlook for the Prairies and High Plains - September 2025 Quarterly Climate Impacts and Outlook for the Canadian and U.S. Prairies and High Plains for June–August 2025, with an outlook for October–December 2025. Dated September 2025. Summer brought mostly ne...

DYK that agriculture.canada.ca 🍁 contributes to the North American Drought Monitor? 🧪

The Prairies/High Plains bulletin for summer is available via the drought.gov Quarterly Climate Impacts and Outlooks.

TLDR? A summer of droughts, wildfires, smoke, and heavy rainfall. ☀️🌧️🔥

🔗 tinyurl.com/5xnvrmrs

🆕 Nature: A driver of economic activity - A new publication from statcan.gc.ca 🍁

"Examining economic activity in Canada through the lens of ecosystems and watersheds can provide a more nuanced view of how industries interact with the Canada's natural resources"

Full article: tinyurl.com/3svtbdcd

Could that be a transcription error for “Pennycook”, a Scottish last name?

Canada needs to invest in the incredible talent that’s already here. That’s where the money needs to go.

Sure, we should hire the elite in American schools where strategically warranted.

But remember, most US hires will head back south across the border when they perceive it’s safe to do so.

I guess we’ll wait and see. We’ve heard this before and ended up being right. To be revisited….

Understanding the Drivers of Drought Onset and Intensification in the Canadian Prairies: Insights from Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) Abstract Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and explainable AI (XAI) have created opportunities to better predict and understand drought processes. This study uses a machine learning approach for understanding the drivers of drought severity and extent in the Canadian Prairies from 2005 to 2019 using climate and satellite data. The model is trained on the Canadian Drought Monitor (CDM), an extensive dataset produced by expert analysis of drought impacts across various sectors that enables a more comprehensive understanding of drought. Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) is used to understand model predictions during emerging or worsening drought conditions, providing insight into the key determinants of drought. The results demonstrate the importance of capturing spatiotemporal autocorrelation structures for accurate drought characterization and elucidates the drought time scales and thresholds that optimally separate each CDM severity category. In general, there is a positive relationship between the severity of drought and the time scale of the anomalies. However, high-severity droughts are also more complex and driven by a multitude of factors. It was found that satellite-based evaporative stress index (ESI), soil moisture, and groundwater were effective predictors of drought onset and intensification. Similarly, anomalous phases of large-scale atmosphere–ocean dynamics exhibit teleconnections with Prairie drought. Overall, this investigation provides a better understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for drought in the Prairies, provides data-driven thresholds for estimating drought severity that could improve future drought assessments, and offers a set of early warning indicators that may be useful for drought adaptation and mitigation. Significance Statement This work is significant because it identifies drivers of drought onset and intensification in an agriculturally and economically important region of Canada. This information can be used in the future to improve early warning for adaptation and mitigation. It also uses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to understand drought, including a novel approach called SHAP probability values to improve interpretability. This provides evidence that machine learning models are not black boxes and should be more widely considered for understanding drought and other hydrometeorological phenomena.

🧪 Mardian [+ agriculture.canada.ca 🍁] et al, 2023: Understanding Drivers of Drought Onset and Intensification in the Cdn Prairies: Insights from Explainable AI.

TLDR? EO-based ESI, soil moisture + groundwater are effective predictors of drought onset and intensification.

🔗 tinyurl.com/5n8te92d

🆕🍁 Système Canadien de surveillance des terres agricoles: IVDN maximal hebdomadaire

📆 22 à 28 septembre 2025
📀 agriculture.canada.ca 🧪

ℹ️ Cartes de l’état des cultures hebdomadaires (IVDN) tout au long de la saison de croissance (fin mars à fin octobre)

Télécharger:
🔗 tinyurl.com/AAFC-CALMS-FR

🆕🍁 Canadian Ag-Land Monitoring System (CALMS): Weekly NDVI anomalies

📆 22 - 28 September, 2025
📀 agriculture.canada.ca 🧪

ℹ️ Weekly crop condition (Max-NDVI) maps throughout growing season (end of March to the end of October).

Download data for *FREE* (2000 to present):
🔗 tinyurl.com/AAFC-CALMS

ℹ️ DYK that agriculture.canada.ca 🍁 participates in #GEO Global Agricultural Monitoring and co-leads the Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment & Monitoring?

JECAM is an international EO collaboration to address food insecurity to support sustainable & profitable ag sectors worldwide. ⤵️

🔗 jecam.org

🍁 DYK that natural-resources.canada.ca hosts Canada's National Air Photo Library?

ℹ️ The NAPL archives more than 6 million aerial photos covering all of Canada, dating back to the 1920s.

🔗 Use the online application to search and retrieve info on more than 3 million air photos: tinyurl.com/CanNAPL

🍁 Ottawa, Central Experimental Farm, 1946!

➡️ View is NE toward Ottawa. Fisher Avenue is the long diagonal road stretching from bottom right toward upper left. Near center of the image, Fisher Ave intersects w/Baseline Rd.

📷 NAPL REA 350-5
🔗 Bygone #Nepean Facebook: www.facebook.com/share/p/1EiT...

Re-Centering Canada: Inside the Modernization of the Canadian Spatial Reference System - GoGeomatics North America is undergoing a significant shift in how geographical positions are defined. Both Canada and the United States are moving away from NAD83 (North American Datum of 1983), a system introdu...

🌎 Re-Centering Canada: Inside the Modernization of the Canadian Spatial Reference System

Canada is moving away from NAD83 (North American Datum 1983), a system introduced in the 1980s that is now misaligned by about two metres from the Earth’s true center of mass.

gogeomatics.ca/re-centering...

OHMYGOD. that’s funny. It was battery powered ;)

2026 ISPRS Congress Welcome to the official website of the 2026 ISPRS Congress hosted by CRSS-SCT! Join us at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for this significant event in Remote Sensing & Geoinformation. Discover in...

📢 The XXV ISPRS Congress & 47th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing is taking place in Toronto, 4–11 July 2026!

👉 Register before 29 September 2025 to save up to $400!

Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with the global RS and photogrammetry community.

🔗 Register now: bit.ly/45hDBD4

Collection: Datasets from Real-Time In-Situ Soil Monitoring for Agriculture 2025 The <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Real-Time In-Situ Soil Monitoring for Agriculture</i> (RISMA) dataset is a collection of publicly ...

🆕🧪 New data from agriculture.canada.ca 🍁: Datasets from Real-Time In-Situ Soil Monitoring for Agriculture 2025

TLDR? Now available: High-quality soil volumetric water content, soil temperature, and meteorological data for ag regions in MB, SK, and ON, Canada.

🔗 ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111...

LOL, I forget. But I learned that you call it a "digital camera" at airports because "radiometer" sounds dangerous.

#FieldworkFriday Late 1990s, La Perouse Bay, Manitoba. Lugging an Exotech 4-band Radiometer and its wooden barium sulphate calibration panel across the Tundra. Fun times.

Same season for sure.

Yes!

Meh. Should've given us the trash panda rather than the swamp donkey.

Courtesy costs nothing.

Depends. For national scale monitoring? Field level? RCM / S1 resolutions with daily coverage would be a start.

Morning! #CdnAg #agriculture

🍁 La semaine prochaine marquera notre dernière publication des anomalies hebdomadaires NDVI du CALMS pour 2025.

Nos données (Max-NDVI, anomalies) pour les saisons de croissance (mars à fin octobre) de 2000 à aujourd’hui sont disponibles en téléchargement gratuit

🔗 ouvert.canada.ca/data/fr/data...

🍁 Next week will be our last posting of the 2025 Canadian Ag-Land Monitoring System (CALMS) Weekly NDVI anomalies.

BUT our data (Max-NDVI + anomalies) for the growing seasons (end of March to end of October) of 2000 to present are available to download for *FREE*:

🔗 open.canada.ca/data/en/data...