Data coverage
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.
Access & permitted use
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DE Africa makes this data available under the Creative Commons Attribute 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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