A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FIVE CROPLAND DATASETS IN AFRICA

SPAM makes plausible estimates of crop distribution within disaggregated units. It moves the data from coarser units such as countries and provinces to finer units such as grid cells and creates a global gridscape at the confluence between earth and agricultural-production systems. It improves spatial understanding of crop production systems and allows policymakers to better target agricultural- and rural-development policies for increasing food security with minimal environmental impacts.

Global cropland distribution is critical for agricultural monitoring and food security. We propose a new Self-adapting Statistics Allocation Model (SASAM) to develop the global map of cropland distribution. SASAM is based on the fusion of multiple existing cropland maps and multilevel statistics of cropland area, which is independent of training samples. The synergy map has higher accuracy than the input datasets and better consistency with the cropland statistics.