Food, water, and fault lines: Remote sensing opportunities for earthquake-response management of agricultural water

Abstract

Earthquakes often cause destructive and unpredictable changes that can affect local hydrology (e.g. groundwater elevation or reduction) and thus disrupt land uses and human activities. Prolific agricultural regions overlie seismically active areas, emphasizing the importance to improve our understanding and monitoring of hydrologic and agricultural systems following a seismic event. A thorough data collection is necessary for adequate postearthquake crop management response; however, the large spatial extent of earthquake's impact makes challenging the collection of robust data sets for identifying locations and magnitude of these impacts. Observing hydrologic responses to earthquakes is not a novel concept, yet there is a lack of methods and tools for assessing earthquake's impacts upon the regional hydrology and agricultural systems. The objective of this paper is to describe how remote sensing imagery, methods and tools allow detecting crop responses and damage incurred after earthquakes because a change in the regional hydrology. Many remote sensing datasets are long archived with extensive coverage and with well-documented methods to assess plant-water relations. We thus connect remote sensing of plant water relations to its utility in agriculture using a post-earthquake agrohydrologic remote sensing (PEARS) framework; specifically in agro-hydrologic relationships associated with recent earthquake events that will lead to improved water management.© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords:Agro-hydrology Disaster management Monitoring Plant-water relations Post-earthquake agrohydrologic remote sensing (PEARS) Remote sensing Background, scope & needEarthquake events threaten food security, resource management and human life, and are observed to be steadily increasing (Ellsworth, 2013). As observed earthquake events continue to increase, it is important to explore and improve response and recovery strategies. Infrastructural damages, especially in urban environments, are at the forefront of research in remote sensing of earthquake-associated damage. Agricultural environments also face catastrophic impacts, often due to adverse hydrologic behavior following the event. The earthquake-water linkage poses particular threats to agricultural productivity, yet difficulty lies in predicting the location, destructiveness, and extent of damage. While effects of earthquake-induced hydrologic changes on crops remain largely unexplored, remote sensing of crop water relations provide a suite of tools to monitor responses and to mitigate crop loss. Remote sensing can address these challenges with archived imagery that has extensive spatial coverage. There are conceptual models that explicitly walk through remote sensing in disaster management (Joyce et al., 2009b) and remote sensing of post-earthquake urban damage (Eguchi et al., 2003) -leaving a gap at the interface of post-earthquake remote sensing of agricultural impacts. We therefore draw attention to current research in understanding earthquake impacts on agric...

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