The National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) congratulates the multidisciplinary team honored with the Symposium Interactive Session Prize Paper Award at IGARSS 2025 for their work advancing crop acreage estimation through integrated remote sensing and geospatial methods. The team’s research builds on the study “Utilizing Remote Sensing and Geospatial Data to Characterize Administrative Data Undercoverage for Crop Acreage Estimation” (Nagle et al., IGARSS 2024), which laid the groundwork for identifying and quantifying gaps in administrative agricultural records using satellite imagery and geospatial layers.
The award-winning effort addressed a persistent challenge for national statistics producers: administrative datasets frequently undercount crop area because of incomplete reporting and dynamic land-use changes. By combining satellite-derived land-cover signals with administrative records and survey samples, the team developed an approach to detect undercovered areas, estimate the magnitude of undercoverage, and produce corrected acreage figures that explicitly quantify uncertainty.
A Research Fellow from NISS was a key member of the team, contributing statistical modeling and geospatial analysis expertise central to the project’s success. Their work focused on spatiotemporal model development, rigorous uncertainty propagation, and the integration of heterogeneous data streams – advances that strengthened the reliability of adjusted acreage estimates and enabled transparent communication of confidence to stakeholders.
The practical implications of this work are significant: more accurate and timely crop acreage estimates support better policymaking, market forecasting, and food-security planning, while offering a scalable pathway for national statistical offices to incorporate remote sensing into operational workflows. The methodological innovations also illustrate how collaboration between statisticians and remote-sensing scientists can produce actionable improvements in official statistics.
NISS celebrates the recognition of this team at IGARSS 2025 and underscores the value of applied statistical research in addressing real-world data gaps. The Research Fellow’s contributions exemplify NISS’s mission to advance statistical science that enhances national data systems and informs decisions affecting agriculture and food systems.