Arkansas Rice Fields NAIP 2019

ABOUT THIS GROUND

The Grand Prairie of eastern Arkansas, between the White and the Arkansas rivers, grows more rice than any other place in the United States; the fields are flooded behind low levees that follow the land's contours, with the reservoirs and tailwater ditches cut into the same grid. This composite is seventy-three NAIP quarter-quads from the 2019 season — sixty-six of them flown on 12 August — levelled against each other on their true shared overlap and merged into one field nine kilometres on a side at 60 cm ground sample distance. In four-band imagery the division is clean: growing rice registers red, standing water comes back dark, and the contour levees draw the shape of the prairie as fine nested lines.