David J. Mulla

David J. Mulla is a U.S. Soil Scientist. He is internationally recognized for pioneering research in precision agriculture. He played an important role in the organization of the International Conference on Precision Agriculture (ICPA), which started as a small workshop in Minneapolis in the early 1990s and developed into the International Society of Precision Agriculture (ISPA). Until 2008, the meetings of the ICPA were hosted by the University of Minnesota. In 2013 he published a highly cited review of advances in remote sensing for precision agriculture.
He currently holds the W.E. Larson Chair in Soil and Water Resources in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources Science (CFANS) at the University of Minnesota. He was also Director of the Precision Agriculture Center at the University of Minnesota, which was established in 1995 and was the first Center of its kind. In June 2023 he became a member of the Executive Advisory Committee of AI-CLIMATE, an AI Institute led by the University of Minnesota announced in May 2023 and supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The AI-CLIMATE team will apply artificial intelligence to agriculture and forestry to develop more accurate methods of estimating the amount of carbon sequestered in a field or forestry plot. This will help farmers and foresters in making land use decisions and enable the development of carbon markets that will provide income to them and their communities.
==Education==
Mulla received a BS in Earth Science in 1979 from the University of California, Riverside, and an MS in Agronomy in 1981 from Purdue University. His PhD in Agronomy (1983) with an emphasis on soil physics was also from Purdue University. Mulla's PhD dissertation was entitled “The molecular dynamics, specific surface area, crystal composition, and swelling of clay-water systems.”
==Career==
Mulla began his academic career in 1983 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Washington State University (WSU) and was promoted to Professor in 1993. He came to the University of Minnesota in March 1995 and since then has been Larson Chair for Soil and Water Resources in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate at the University of Minnesota (CFANS). He was Director of the Precision Agriculture Center at the University of Minnesota from January 2004 to July 2023 and was appointed a Founding Fellow of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota in 2007.
==Research==
Mulla has more than 220 publications with a transdisciplinary range of coauthors. His research includes precision agriculture and precision conservation, watershed management and modeling, and agricultural water quality.
Mulla’s work in precision agriculture includes groundbreaking work in the development of the concept of management zones. His work in modeling water quality includes the transport of nitrogen, phosphorus, pesticides and sediment to either surface or groundwater, and has included pollution studies in Minnesota and beyond. This includes research on hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico (the so-called Dead Zone) that results from the loss of nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer in agricultural areas far upstream from the Gulf, including Minnesota. This work led in 1998 to him being appointed to the White House Task Force on Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, which was established in 1997.
Mulla’s work on water quality in Minnesota is extensive. He has been able to assess the efficacy of Best Managements Practices (BMPs) for the variety of water resources in the state, from lakes and rivers to groundwater, and his expertise has been called on by the Minnesota state legislature. In 2023, he developed an innovative approach at utility scale ground mounted solar facilities to account for impacts on stormwater runoff of precipitation, solar array spacing and orientation, disconnected impervious surfaces, soil depth and bulk density, and perennial vegetation between arrays. 
The geographical scope of Mulla’s work extends to the Palouse region of eastern Washington as well as more than twenty countries including Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia, India, and China. In Morocco, he collaborated on a Millennium Challenge Corporation project that resulted in planting 8 million olive trees to control erosion and sequester carbon on 75,000 ha of environmentally vulnerable rainfed land. 
==Selected Publications==
Yang, W., T. Nigon, Z. Hao, G. Dias Paiao, F. Fernandez, D. Mulla, and C. Yang. 2021. Estimation of corn yield based on hyperspectral imagery and convolutional neural network. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 184: 106092.
Tokekar, P., J. Vander Hook, D. Mulla, and V. Isler. 2016. Sensor Planning for a Symbiotic UAV and UGV System for Precision Agriculture. IEEE Trans. Robotics 32:1498-1511.
Barnes, R., C. Lehman and D. Mulla. 2014. Priority-flood: An optimal depression-filling and watershed-labeling algorithm for digital elevation models. Computers & Geosciences. 62:117–127.
Mamo, M., G. L. Malzer, D. J. Mulla, D. J. Huggins, and J. Strock. 2003. Spatial and temporal variation in economically optimum N rate for corn. Agronomy J. 95:958-964.
Category:University of California alumni
Category:Purdue University alumni
Category:Soil scientists
Category:Precision agriculture