A team from the Kyiv Aviation Institute has developed the NVS-knot app, which integrates satellite and hydrological data for decision-making in agriculture. Among 15,000 teams from all over the world, NVS-knot took first place in the Galactic Impact category.
The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is a hackathon that brings together developers, designers, scientists, and innovators from around the world. In 48 hours, participants create innovative solutions to overcome challenges in science, technology, ecology, and space.
“To make it clear how serious the competition is, more than 90 thousand people from all over the world took part in the competition and about 10 thousand teams created projects. About 1000 projects were evaluated directly by NASA. And among them, our team won!” says Roman Malkevych, the local leader of this competition in Kyiv.
What exactly does NVS-knot solve
Farmers face many water-related challenges due to unpredictable weather, pests and diseases. These factors can have a significant impact on crop health, farmers’ incomes, and food security. Depending on their geographical location, many farmers may face droughts or floods – sometimes both of these extreme events occur during the same season.
The team has developed a tool that will allow farmers to easily explore, analyze, and use NASA datasets to address these water-related challenges and improve their agricultural practices.
The project brought together three separate teams to develop an original and highly innovative application that enables farmers to manage risks during planting:
- Nave Analytics integrates satellite data and hydrological models into federated soil hydrology data products, ensuring that the input data and the product for capturing crop risk are based on sound agronomic and hydrological principles.
- VITech provides an advanced cloud architecture that allows the platform to process large data sets with efficiency and scalability.
- The third participant, the Sparrow team, focuses on developing an intuitive user interface, ensuring that the application is accessible and highly useful to farmers through clear, actionable information and a simplified user experience.
The team has created a pre-planting soil moisture assessment tool to help address a number of water-related risks during planting.
How NVS-knot works
The team has formed the concept of a pre-sowing moisture assessment service focused on answering two main questions that farmers have:
- Is the soil moisture level sufficient for crop germination?
- Is it safe to use sowing equipment in the fields?
For both questions, the service provides groundwater information, detailing the answers in space and time, providing a daily moisture risk assessment for each 100-meter section of a farmer’s field, at least 2 weeks ahead in time. It also offers aggregations and summaries that can help farmers and agronomists make field-level decisions with confidence.
To answer the first question, the app provides an assessment of the risk of insufficient crop moisture. This quantitative indicator is closely related to the probability that the water content in the top 15 cm of soil exceeds the agronomically sound minimum level. This depth corresponds to the typical row crop sowing depth used in most regions of the world where row crops are grown.
For the second question, NVS-knot will provide an estimate of the risk of soil saturation at the same 15 cm depth. This indicator can help farmers better assess the suitability of the field for large machinery. As a summary, the app provides a graph of risk categories for sowing (sowing window) based on the two sufficiency and saturation scores, rating a particular day as “poor”, “satisfactory”, “good” or “best” for sowing.
The app also features a Second Opinion tab to help progressive farmers and agronomists gain confidence in their assessments with direct reports on soil moisture, uncertainty, spatial differentiation, and risk zone context.
