Workshops

Wolf Point, MT
March 12, 2008: A VegDRI workshop hosted by the Fort Peck Tribes was held at the Fort Peck Community College in Wolf Point, MT, on March 12, 2008. The workshop was intended to introduce local agricultural producers, tribal natural resource managers, and governmental agency representatives to the VegDRI tools and products. Feedback was also collected from the group of 38 participants regarding the general utility of VegDRI and the specific informational product needs for their respective interests. Carl Four Star, the water resources administrator for the Fort Peck Reservation, also presented the current drought planning and mitigation activities on the tribal lands and discussed how a tool such as VegDRI would be useful for these activities.
San Angelo, TX
April 24, 2008: VegDRI was presented at the Drought Planning Tools Workshop held at the Texas AgriLife Research and Extension Center in San Angelo, TX. In addition to VegDRI, workshop participants were introduced to a number of other complimentary drought monitoring tools being developed at the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), such as the Drought Impact Reporter (DIR) (http://droughtreporter.unl.edu/) and Drought Atlas. The workshop had 80+ attendees that included local ranchers and farmers, local and state government representatives, Texas A&M extension experts, and National Weather Service personnel.

Other Meetings

Boulder, CO
February 6-7, 2008: Dr. Brian Wardlow presented VegDRI at the NIDIS (National Integrated Drought Information System) Knowledge Assessment Workshop: Contributions of Satellite Remote Sensing to Drought Monitoring (http://wwa.colorado.edu/current_projects/nidis_remote_sensing_workshop.html) on February 6-7, 2008, in Boulder, CO. VegDRI was one of several operational remote sensing-based tools spotlighted at the meeting in an effort to identify the current ‘state-of-the-art’ vegetation drought monitoring approaches in the United States for the user community and provide recommendations on how such tools can be implemented in cross-sector/agency early warning drought monitoring strategies.
Boston, MA
April 16, 2008: Dr. Brian Wardlow presented VegDRI results from 2007 in a natural hazards session at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting in Boston, MA. The ‘convergence of evidence’ evaluation strategy implemented for VegDRI was discussed and specific examples of VegDRI’s performance during the 2007 growing season were presented for selected locations in the central United States.