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New digital tool provides satellite monitoring of crop health across US
LAWRENCE — Researchers from the University of Kansas, with support from the KansasView and AmericaView programs, have created a web-based app for the public that provides free satellite monitoring and analysis of vegetation and crop health across Kansas and the nation, called the Sentinel GreenReport Plus. The app’s tools should lead to better-informed agricultural producers, policymakers, insurers and research ecologists in Kansas and across the nation, according to the researchers.
Study simulates pulling on athlete’s jersey to predict noncontact ACL injuries
LAWRENCE — Contact sports frequently see athletes go down with ACL injuries, but they most commonly do not result from direct contact to the knee. To better understand indirect contact knee injuries, a University of Kansas study has simulated pulling on an athlete’s jersey while jumping to determine which types of contact are most risky for such injuries, finding pulling from behind is the most dangerous and that upper body strength is more important in preventing injuries than perhaps thought.
KU composer creates choral music to match ‘mystical’ texts
LAWRENCE – The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown was a challenging time for Forrest Pierce, professor of composition at the University of Kansas School of Music. He now says his lifeline was writing “The Bell and the Blackbird,” which has its North American premiere in a pair of concerts May 31 and June 1 by the Kansas City, Missouri-based choral group Te Deum.
KPR announces new ‘Morning Edition’ host
LAWRENCE — Kansas Public Radio has welcomed a new program host with deep roots in public radio. Matthew Algeo began as KPR’s new “Morning Edition” host May 26. Algeo has hosted public radio programs on stations in Seattle, Minnesota, St. Louis, Maine and Rhode Island. He has also worked on NPR’s Newscast desk, writing and editing anchor copy.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected]
New digital tool provides satellite monitoring of crop health across US
LAWRENCE — Researchers from the University of Kansas, with support from the KansasView and AmericaView programs, have created a web-based app for the public that provides free satellite monitoring and analysis of vegetation and crop health across Kansas and the nation, called the Sentinel GreenReport Plus.
The free digital tool integrates Google Earth Engine with high-resolution imagery from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite mission, consisting of two identical satellites that share the same orbit. The Sentinel GreenReport Plus combines this satellite imagery with climate datasets from the PRISM group. As a public-service resource, the tool provides users with up-to-the-day insights into vegetation greenness, changes in land cover over time and climate abnormalities.
According to its KU creators, the Sentinel GreenReport Plus already has seen use in monitoring crops, assessing damage from drought, detecting changes in land use and tracking vegetation recovery following a disaster.
“Remote sensing and satellite imagery technology has been improving in terms of the spatial footprint that it can represent in a pixel,” said Dana Peterson, director of KansasView and senior research associate with Kansas Applied Remote Sensing, a program of the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research at KU. “This allows us to do more detailed monitoring of vegetation condition — it could be vegetation in a forest community, a cropland community or on rangeland. We could create a tool that would allow access to these data easily and create an interface where people — whether educators, researchers, ranchers or cropland producers — could access the imagery easily and look at vegetation health.”
The KU team said the public-facing digital tool could be used further to assess vegetation destruction from natural hazards or even more routine damage like hail.
“We’ve also looked at some of the burn events and wildfires,” Peterson said. “You can look at how the vegetation has been damaged and to what extent and severity.”
The Sentinel GreenReport Plus improves detail and insight over the classic GreenReport, introduced in 1996 with support from NASA by the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program. The new Sentinel GreenReport Plus is underpinned by Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite data, a much finer 10-meter resolution than the classic version relying on 1,000-meter resolution MODIS imagery.
Abinash Silwal, KU graduate student and tech lead in the project, said any agricultural producer could use the tools to assess the success of different crops, monitor crop health or compare crop conditions over time, which may indicate yield performance. The tool integrates USDA NASS Cropland Data Layers, which allows crop-specific stress analysis.
“We can look at vegetation health at the crop-type level,” Silwal said. “For example, if I want to monitor my field of corn, I can select ‘corn’ in the app and draw a rectangle or polygon around the area. The tool instantly displays multiple charts, including a time series and comparison charts showing current vegetation health relative to historical averages. This helps determine whether the crop’s current condition falls within the normal range or is showing signs of stress.”
The heart of the Sentinel Green Report PLUS is underpinned by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. The Sentinel GreenReport PLUS has several key features:
Greenness Map: Uses the NDVI as a proxy for photosynthetically active plant biomass over a selected composite period.
Difference Map 1: Compares NDVI to the previous composite period within the same year, illustrating recent vegetation changes.
Difference Map 2: Compares NDVI to the same period from the previous year, highlighting year-over-year vegetation changes.
Difference Map 3: Compares current NDVI to the average NDVI from previous years, showing changes relative to historical trends.
Aside from Peterson and Silwal, the team that produced the Sentinel GreenReport Plus is composed of Chen Liang, former doctoral student; Jude Kastens, research associate professor and director of KARS; and Xingong Li, professor of geography & atmospheric science.
The KU researchers know stakeholders have found many features to be valuable. For instance, Silwal said the ability to compare vegetation health with precipitation adds a powerful dimension to understanding vegetation stress.
“The addition of the precipitation curve is the coolest thing,” he said. “If I see that vegetation health is below normal and the precipitation curve is flat or shows significantly lower rainfall compared to the 30-year historical statistics, we can infer that drought may be contributing to the stress. When the vegetation line is declining and the accumulated precipitation trend remains flat or below average, it points to possible drought conditions affecting crop health.”
These breakthroughs should lead to better-informed agricultural producers, policymakers, insurers and research ecologists in Kansas and across the nation, Peterson said.
She added the Sentinel GreenReport Plus might represent “a better way to understand the interplay of climate and vegetation. Users can visualize trends, generate crop-specific charts and download outputs to support reports, presentations and further analysis.”
For more information, visit the program’s website.
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Research at KU powers 54 active startups with more than half based in Kansas.
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Editors: See video.
Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected]
Study simulates pulling on athlete’s jersey to predict noncontact ACL injuries
LAWRENCE — Contact sports frequently see athletes go down with ACL injuries, but they most commonly do not result from direct contact to the knee. To better understand indirect contact knee injuries, a University of Kansas study has simulated pulling on an athlete’s jersey while jumping to determine which types of contact are most risky for such injuries, finding pulling from behind is the most dangerous and that upper body strength is more important in preventing injuries than perhaps thought.
In sports like football, basketball, volleyball and soccer, competitors frequently suffer knee injuries. To better understand how the injuries happen and how to prevent them, the KU study had participants jump while a strap connected to their torso dropped a weighted “slam ball” to pull on them from either the right or left side or from the posterior. The pull simulated injuries where contact to the body but not the knee results in ACL injuries.
“Studies have shown that sports with contact have a more than five times higher chance of ACL injuries than noncontact sports,” said the study’s lead author Yu Song, assistant professor of health, sport & exercise sciences and director of the Biomechanics Laboratory at KU. “We are looking at where most of that contact happens. Most of the time it’s in the trunk region when a player is jumping, cutting, planting their foot or changing direction that contributes to injury. So, we’re working to quantify in a lab setting how that trunk contact affects the knee.”
For the study, the research team recruited 31 participants who are active in sports and had no prior history of knee injuries. After warming up, the subjects performed a series of jumps where they jumped from both feet and landed on one. For all jumps, the slam ball was connected to their torso via a strap that did not impede movement. While attempting to touch a basketball fixed above them, researchers dropped the slam ball either front or rear of the subject to simulate someone pulling on their jersey forward or backward. Whole body kinematics and ground reaction forces were measured using optoreflective cameras that measured movements of joints and trunk angles and force plates that measured force applied during takeoff and landing.
Posterior pulling proved to be the most significant in the effect it had on subjects. Jumpers landed with impact of more than two times their body weight during the condition. It also resulted in the smallest peak trunk and knee flexion angles, resulting in subjects landing in such a way that applied more stress to their joints, increasing risk for injury. Anterior pulling saw the highest peak trunk flexion and smallest peak knee extension.
The results help illustrate the importance of the torso in knee injuries. Research has shown that most ACL injuries do not result from direct contact to the knee or leg.
“If we show that being pulled back is more dangerous, which this study indicates, what can we do? We don’t say you can’t play sports, but it suggests that developing your trunk is very important and effective,” Song said. “We can suggest it’s important for athletes not only to do strength training, but to focus on the core and do things like neuromuscular training where you have resistance or pulling.”
The study, co-written with Zhichen Feng, Kareem Mersal and Lauren Salsgiver of the University of Wyoming, Kaden Van Valkenburg of the University of Utah and Boyi Dai of the University of Vermont, was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports.
In addition to the published work, ongoing research projects continue to strengthen these efforts within the Biomechanics Laboratory at KU. Song praised several undergraduate students who contributed to ongoing studies. The students, not only exercise sciences majors (Anne Jordan, Thanh Nguyen, Nawfal Malik, Lexi Dillon, Lexi Rasmussen), but also from majors ranging from biology to mechanical engineering (Kristina Lincoln, Phoebe Lane, Hammad Javed) at KU, as well as Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence (Elijah Savala) conducted data gathering and research for the Biomechanics Laboratory in KU’s Department of Health, Sport and Exercise Sciences, and they recently presented the preliminary findings at KU’s Undergraduate Research Symposium.
The study builds on Song and colleagues’ work to better understand both risk factors for knee injuries and previous research on how single-leg hopping can predict recovery from ACL surgery. Future research will expand on the study by pulling on subjects when they start a jump or when planting a foot to see if one is more dangerous. They also plan to see if a subject knowing which direction a pull is coming from changes their kinematic reactions.
While the studies can help better understand causes of knee injuries, Song emphasized that no subjects were injured while performing the jumps. Taken in total, the research can help coaches, trainers, athletes and medical personnel better understand ways to anticipate and prevent what can often be devastating injuries.
“We know being pulled during competition is dangerous. This helps us understand from a biomechanical standpoint what happens to the body when it occurs and what we can do to help prevent it,” Song said. “It also helps show that you don’t only want to look at the knee, but up at the trunk and what’s happening throughout the body.”
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KU provides fire, rescue and law enforcement training across Kansas.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected]
KU composer creates choral music to match ‘mystical’ texts
LAWRENCE – The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown was a challenging time for Forrest Pierce, professor of composition at the University of Kansas School of Music. He now says his lifeline was writing “The Bell and the Blackbird,” which has its North American premiere in a pair of concerts May 31 and June 1 by the Kansas City, Missouri-based choral group Te Deum.
“All of the choirs all around the world stopped singing for the year because of the pandemic, with the exception of the Australian choirs, so I had a large number of premieres and performances that year that were just canceled,” Pierce said. “Some of those choirs never came back into existence afterward, but the Australian Voices, who commissioned ‘The Bell and the Blackbird,’ kept singing. And it was really a great thing, because it kind of saved me as a composer to have something to work on; where I knew that there were people somewhere in the world who were going to be learning this piece and performing and presenting it.”
It’s a setting of a poem by the same title by contemporary Anglo-American David Whyte.
“‘The Bell and the Blackbird’ hasn’t been done in North America, so I’m very excited about it,” Pierce said. “That piece is concerned with the liminal spaces, the boundaries between the order and structure of our human existence and our simultaneous attraction to the wildness of utter freedom, and how we go back and forth. The poet compares the sound of a blackbird singing and the sound of a bell, both of which have these very unusual, what we would call nonharmonic spectra.”
Pierce said he tried to convey that musically with a recurring, dissonant motif that never truly gets resolved.
“We find that we actually can live with the tension in the music,” Pierce said. “We can find the right context to make the tension of apparent dissonance part of the harmony. It doesn’t need to go anywhere. It doesn’t need to do anything. That’s just a beautiful sound. And that’s part of who we are as humans … complex and sometimes sweet and sometimes tangy. And, you know, we can live with that.”
Te Deum will perform two other, older works by Pierce.
“The Old Ground” is from 2003 and is a setting of a text by American activist and poet Wendell Berry.
“It’s essentially an anthem for Advent — that period that leads up to Christmas in the Christian tradition — that has much broader implications,” Pierce said. “You could say it has more animistic overtones. It’s about … how the earth continually brings forward good things over and over with each season. It’s a very mystical text that has to do with spirit and what it means to be human.”
Pierce explained how he wrote the music to underscore Berry’s words: “The text itself references the shepherds in the story of Christmas being visited by the heavenly host — the angels — and being told ‘fear not.’ So there’s a kind of gesture that’s present in the tenors and basses that is a wordless, susurrating, hollow and mysterious melody that’s going on while the text is being sung by the sopranos and altos. So that’s trying to convey the spirit of life; that it’s moving to be reborn again.”
The third Pierce composition Te Deum will perform is “The Darkness Around Us.”
It’s a setting of a work by Kansas-born poet William Stafford.
“It’s about our discourse and the way that … although we could fool each other, we should remember … to let our yes mean yes and our no mean no,” Pierce said. “He compares us to a circus parade, where the elephants are all holding the tail of the one in front. And he says that if one elephant should lose its way, then the parade will be lost in the dark. It closes with the phrase, ‘The darkness around us is deep.’ So it’s a very somber invitation to the audience to consider the ways we converse with each other and to make wise choices.”
Te Deum takes its name from a hymn and is Latin for “To God.” It specializes in sacred, though not necessarily Christian, music.
Matthew Christopher Shepard, artistic and executive director, said he had “long admired Dr. Pierce’s compositions for their beauty, emotional clarity and expressive depth. What truly sets his work apart, though, is his extraordinary sensitivity to text. His compositions are not only musically compelling — they are anchored by his impeccable selection of texts that speak to something spiritual, enduring and deeply human.”
Shepard said the pieces fit perfectly in a program titled “Harmony of Connections.”
“The texts he sets speak of hope, kindness and personal responsibility — qualities that resonate powerfully in today’s world,” Shepard said. “In each piece, his music doesn’t simply support the text; it expands and deepens it, bringing clarity and emotional resonance that allows the listener to experience the words in new and profound ways.”
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Each of Kansas’ 105 counties receives KU Medical Center outreach.
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Contact: Emily DeMarchi, Kansas Public Radio, 785-864-0190, [email protected]
KPR announces new ‘Morning Edition’ host
LAWRENCE — Kansas Public Radio has welcomed a new program host with deep roots in public radio.
Matthew Algeo began as KPR’s new “Morning Edition” host May 26.
Algeo has hosted public radio programs on stations in Seattle, Minnesota, St. Louis, Maine and Rhode Island. He has also worked on NPR’s Newscast desk, writing and editing anchor copy.
In addition to his radio experience, Algeo is also the author of eight books, including “Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure,” which tells the story of a road trip Harry and Bess Truman took shortly after leaving the White House. Algeo has also written for many major publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
For the past 20 years, Algeo has been traveling the world with his wife, Allyson, who will soon retire from the U.S. Foreign Service. They have lived in Mali, Italy, Mongolia, Mozambique, Bosnia and, most recently, Botswana. They have a daughter, Zaya.
Algeo is originally from Philadelphia and holds a degree in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. He’s also worked as a convenience store clerk, a Halloween costume salesman and a hot dog vendor in a traveling circus.
“I am thrilled to join Kansas Public Radio,” Algeo said. “I believe deeply in the mission of public radio and in the importance of local news. My family will put down deep roots here, and we look forward to engaging with the many vibrant communities that KPR serves.”
Algeo added, “I am painfully aware and slightly ashamed to say I am not a native Kansan, and I hope KPR’s listeners will be forgiving if I mispronounce a name or two as I find my footing. And I’m sure they won’t hesitate to correct me if I do.”
KPR, a 22-time winner of the KAB’s Station of the Year, licensed to the University of Kansas, broadcasts on 91.5 FM and 96.1 FM (KPR2) in Lawrence, 89.7 FM in Emporia, 91.3 FM in Olsburg-Junction City, 89.9 FM in Atchison, 90.3 FM in Chanute, and 99.5 FM and 97.9 FM (KPR2) in Manhattan. KPR can be heard online on the KPR website, and KPR2, a news-talk programming stream, which can be heard on an HD receiver or on KPR’s website.
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