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As a member of the faculty in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at Texas Tech, Dr. Maas is responsible for teaching graduate-level courses involving microclimatology, crop modeling, and remote sensing. He also conducts research under a joint appointment with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station (TAES) and as a visiting scientist at the USDA-ARS Plant Stress Laboratory on the Texas Tech campus at Lubbock, TX, where he specializes in the interactions of crop plants with their environment. Dr. Maas received tenure in February of 2004.
Dr. Maas was born in 1950 in Temple, TX. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in meteorology from Texas A&M University at College Station, TX, in 1973 and 1975, respectively. Following graduation, he worked at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station at Temple, TX. There he developed and tested TAMW, a crop growth simulation model for wheat, and assisted in developing SORGF, a grain sorghum growth simulation model. He subsequently spent two years (1980-1981) in a joint TAES-USDA appointment with the Statistical Reporting Service (now National Agricultural Statistics Service) in Washington, DC. There he investigated the use of crop models in making operational yield predictions. He returned to graduate school in 1982 and received his Ph.D. in agronomy from Texas A&M in 1985, having conducted his graduate research under the guidance of Dr. C.H.M. van Bavel.
Dr. Maas was a member of the USDA-ARS Remote Sensing Research Unit at Weslaco, Texas, from 1984-1993. At Weslaco, Dr. Maas was involved in numerous studies involving remote sensing of crop growth and condition, and pioneered the development and testing of a methodology for incorporating remotely sensed information into plant growth simulation models. He developed and tested GRAMI, a model that can use remote sensing data in simulating the growth and yield of grain crops, and PrOBE, a model for simulating regional biomass production and evapotranspiration using remote sensing data. He developed a version of the GRAMI model used by the Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) of USDA in estimating regional crop production.
From 1993-2000, Dr. Maas was a member of the USDA-ARS Western Integrated Cropping Systems Research Unit at Shafter, CA, where he was responsible for research into environmental effects on crop growth, crop simulation modeling, and agricultural applications of remote sensing. Dr. Maas led the development of the Shafter Airborne Multispectral Remote Sensing System (SAMRSS), a multispectral imaging package which has been used extensively in collecting remote sensing data to support the unit's precision farming research efforts. These efforts included the development of remote sensing tools for detecting insect infestations and water stress in agricultural crops. He also studied the within-field spatial relationships between crop yield and remotely sensed data. From 1997-2000, Dr. Maas served as a Site Coordinator in a cooperative project between USDA-ARS and Resource21 (of Englewood, CO) investigating precision farming applications of remote sensing. Starting in 1999, Dr. Maas served as USDA coordinator for a large project under the Ag20/20 Program involving cooperative research efforts by federal, university, and private groups to develop and test precision farming technologies on a cooperating farm at Lemoore, CA. He served as Acting Research Leader for the USDA-ARS research unit at Shafter prior to joining Texas Tech.
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