Crop Type Maps for Operational Global Agricultural Monitoring

Abstract

Crop type maps identify the spatial distribution of crop types and underpin a large range of agricultural monitoring applications ranging from early warning of crop shortfalls, crop condition assessments, production forecasts, and damage assessment from extreme weather, to agricultural statistics, agricultural insurance, and climate mitigation and adaptation decisions. Despite their importance, harmonized, up-to-date global crop type maps of the main food commodities do not exist to date. To address this critical data gap of global-scale consistent, up-to-date crop type maps, we harmonized 24 national and regional datasets from 21 sources covering 66 countries to develop a set of Best Available Crop Specific masks (BACS) over the major production and export countries for wheat, maize, rice, and soybeans, in the context of the G20 Global Agriculture Monitoring Program, GEOGLAM.

Fig. 1

Individual products used per country to assemble the final GEOGLAM Best Available Crop Masks.

Fig. 2

Cumulative scores and the contribution from each criterion for all of the individual products used to assemble the final GEOGLAM Best Available Crop Masks.

Fig. 3

All five crop masks are shown as a percent per pixel at 0.05 degrees that are covered by an individual crop. Areas with a higher percent per pixel of a crop are shown in darker blue while areas with a lower percent per pixel are shown in light yellow.

Fig. 4

SPAM 2010 v2.0 physical area for maize in Argentina at CMG level (left) compared to the physical area for maize from the Argentina National Map of Crops 2018/2019 campaign at CMG level (right).