Crop Area Mapping in Southern and Central Malawi With Google Earth Engine

Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa consists primarily of smallholder farms of rainfed crops. Historically, satellite data were too coarse to account for the heterogeneity in these landscapes. Sentinel-2 data have improved spectral resolution and much higher spatial resolution (10 m) than previously available satellites with global coverage, such as Landsat or MODIS, making mapping smallholder farms possible. Spectral mixture analysis was used to convert the Sentinel-2 signal into fractions of green vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation, soil, and shade endmembers. Very high spatial resolution imagery in Google Earth Pro was used to identify locations of crop and natural vegetation classes, with over 20,000 reference points interpreted. The high temporal resolution of Sentinel-2 (5 days repeat) allows for classification of landcover based on the phenological signal, with natural areas having smoothly varying amounts of photosynthetic vegetation annually, while cropped areas show more abrupt changes, and also the presence of bare soil due to agricultural activity at some point during the year. We summarized the endmember values using monthly medians, extracted values for the reference data points, randomly split them into training and test data sets, and input the training data into the random forests algorithm in Google Earth Engine to map crop area. We divided southern and central Malawi into tiles, and found crop/no crop classification accuracies on the test data for each tile to be between 87 and 93%. The 10 m map of crop area was aggregated to the district level and showed an R 2 of 0.74 with ground-based statistics from the Malawi government and 0.79 with a remotely sensed product developed by the USGS.