Smallholder Crop Area Mapped with Wall-To-Wall WorldView Sub-Meter Panchromatic Image Texture: A Test Case for Tigray, Ethiopia

Abstract: Global food production in the developing world occurs within sub-hectare fields that are difficult to identify with moderate resolution satellite imagery. Knowledge about the distribution of these fields is critical in food security programs. We developed a semi-automated image segmentation approach using wall-to-wall sub-meter imagery with high-performance computing to map crop area (CA) throughout Tigray, Ethiopia that encompasses over 41,000 km (exp 2). Multiple processing streams were tes…