Digital Earth Africa Cropland Extent Map (2019)

Digital Earth Africa's cropland extent map (2019) shows the estimated location of croplands in Africa for the period January to December 2019. Cropland is defined as: "a piece of land of minimum 0.01 ha (a single 10m x 10m pixel) that is sowed/planted and harvest-able at least once within the 12 months after the sowing/planting date." This definition will exclude non-planted grazing lands and perennial crops which can be difficult for satellite imagery to differentiate from natural vegetation. This provisional cropland extent map has a resolution of 10m, and was built using Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images from 2019. The cropland extent map was produced using extensive training data from regions across Africa, coupled with a Random Forest machine learning model. The continental service contains maps built separately for eight Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZs). For a detailed exploration of the methods used to produce the cropland extent map, read the Jupyter Notebooks in DE Africa’s crop-mask GitHub repository.