Location: Crop Improvement and Protection Research
Project Number: 2038-22000-019-026-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jun 1, 2021
End Date: May 31, 2023
Objective:
To determine the percentage of strawberry-producing acreage in crop rotations in each major strawberry producing district in California.
Approach:
ArcGIS (a software program for analysis of geographic trends) will be used to draw polygons around strawberry production fields in the main strawberry-producing areas of Monterey, Santa Cruz, Santa Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties. Maps will be generated for each year between 2000 and 2020 to assess historical trends. We will use the USDA Croplands Database (remote sensing data from 1997-present), Google Earth images (satellite images from 1985 to present), and mapping data from the California Strawberry Commission acreage surveys (1998-present) to identify strawberry production fields. Data will be compared between years to determine the % of strawberry acreage in each year where strawberries were also produced in the previous year. Fields with recent disease outbreaks of Fusarium wilt or Macrophomina charcoal rot will be noted. We will analyze regional trends in crop rotation between the three major strawberry producing regions in California.
