NASA Harvest / Earthdata
NASA Harvest and NASA Earthdata together form a satellite-based agricultural monitoring and data access ecosystem managed by NASA, providing researchers, governments, development organizations, and food security analysts with access to Earth observation data products specifically designed to support agricultural monitoring, crop assessment, and food security analysis globally, with particular programs focused on African agricultural systems including Nigeria.
NASA Earthdata is the overarching data access portal for all NASA Earth observation data, providing a unified discovery and download interface — including programmatic API access — to the complete archive of NASA satellite data products across all Earth science domains. For agricultural applications, the most relevant Earthdata products include MODIS vegetation indices (NDVI and EVI at 250m and 500m spatial resolution), Landsat surface reflectance imagery at 30m resolution, SMAP soil moisture, GRACE groundwater anomalies, and various derived land cover and crop area products. The Earthdata API allows programmatic search, filter, and bulk download of these datasets covering Nigeria and all global agricultural regions.
NASA Harvest is a specific program within the NASA Earth Applied Sciences Division focused on food security and agriculture. Led by the University of Maryland, NASA Harvest develops applied satellite-based monitoring tools for national-level crop assessment and food security analysis, with particular expertise in sub-Saharan Africa. NASA Harvest products include seasonal crop monitoring bulletins, crop area mapping for key countries, and research tools for improving crop production estimation using satellite data.
The MODIS vegetation index products available through Earthdata — specifically MOD13Q1 and MYD13Q1 at 250m resolution with 16-day compositing — provide global time series of NDVI and EVI extending back to 2000. For Nigerian agricultural research, this 24+ year time series enables long-term analysis of vegetation condition trends, identification of multi-year drought signatures, and assessment of land degradation and agricultural expansion patterns across Nigerian agricultural zones. These historical baselines are essential for contextualizing current-season conditions relative to historical norms.
Landsat imagery at 30m resolution and 16-day revisit provides detailed land cover analysis capability for Nigeria, enabling crop type mapping, agricultural area estimation, field boundary delineation, and land use change monitoring at scales relevant to individual farm fields. Nigerian government agencies building land cadastre systems, research programs mapping the extent of specific crop cultivation, and environmental organizations monitoring agricultural frontier expansion can use Landsat data through the Earthdata API for these applications.
SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) satellite data, accessible through Earthdata, provides global soil moisture estimates at approximately 9-36km spatial resolution. Soil moisture is the primary driver of rain-fed crop water stress across Nigeria's agricultural zones, and SMAP data allows monitoring of soil water conditions throughout the growing season. When SMAP shows below-average soil moisture across a major Nigerian agricultural zone during the critical crop growth period, this provides early warning of potential yield depression before satellite vegetation indices reflect the stress.
The Earthdata programmatic API allows developers to search the entire NASA data catalog using spatial (bounding box or polygon), temporal, and product name filters, then download matched granules programmatically. For Nigerian research applications requiring large volumes of satellite data — multi-year time series, multi-sensor analysis, multi-region comparison studies — the API-based bulk download capability is essential for assembling the datasets needed without manual browsing and downloading of individual files through web interfaces.