OpTIS

CTIC has partnered with Dagan and The Nature Conservancy on application and validation of the Operational Tillage Information System (OpTIS), an automated system to map tillage, residue cover, winter cover, and soil health practices using remote sensing data. OpTIS, a Dagan technology, was developed with funding from the USDA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program between 2011 and 2016. While OpTIS calculations are performed at the farm-field scale using publicly available data, the privacy of individual producers is fully protected by reporting only spatially-aggregated results at regional and watershed scales. OpTIS-based data are currently available for the years 2005 through 2018 for the US Corn Belt, including all of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa, as well as parts of: Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

 

Tillage data for years earlier than 2005 are available through the CRM Survey.