National Land Cover and Crop Mapping Through the Digital Earth Africa Platform

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has launched the Earth Observation for Official Statistics (EOSTAT) project in support of the Hand-in-Hand (HiH) initiative. EOSTAT is deploying a set of novel approaches, data sources, and analytical tools to drive agricultural innovation. Currently, there are limited resources to collect, analyse and disseminate agricultural statistics on a regular basis. Earth Observation (EO) data is an ideal solution to fill this gap and strengthen the capacity to generate crop statistics at national and subnational levels. However, access, storage, pre-processing and analysis of EO data is limiting its use and uptake. Under the framework of the EOSTAT project, FAO has established a collaboration with Digital Earth Africa and FrontierSI to develop an open-source, user-friendly solution that will facilitate countries in Africa to map land cover and crop types. This project has developed a prototype land cover classification workflow within the Digital Earth Africa platform that is scalable to enable land use monitoring at a local and national scale. An initial land cover map for Rwanda has been produced and assessed through comparison against validation data and stakeholder engagement. This workflow along with future crop monitoring work conducted as part of this project will empower countries in Africa to implement a cost-effective land use and crop monitoring system (crop area and yield) using the Digital Earth Africa platform and satellite imagery.