Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Cropland expansion is expected to increase across sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries in the next thirty years to meet growing food needs across the continent. These land transformations will have cascading social and ecological impacts that can be monitored using novel Earth observation techniques that produce datasets complementary to national cropland surveys. In this study, we present a flexible Bayesian data synthesis workflow on Google Earth Engine (GEE) that can be used to fuse optical and synthetic aperture radar data and demonstrate its ability to track agricultural change at national scales. We adapted the previously developed Bayesian Updating of Land Cover (Unsupervised) algorithm (BULC-U) by integrating a shapelet and slope thresholding algorithm to identify the locations and dates of cropland expansion and implemented a tiling scheme to allow the processing of large volumes of imagery. We apply this approach to map annual cropland change from 2000 to 2015 for Zambia (750,000 km2), a country that is experiencing rapid growth in agricultural land. We applied our cropland mapping approach to a time series of unsupervised classifications developed from Landsat 5, 7, 8, Sentinel-1, and ALOS PALSAR within 1476 tiles covering Zambia. The annual cropland changes maps reveal active cropland expansion between 2000 to 2015 in Zambia, especially in the Southern, Central, and Eastern provinces. Our accuracy assessment estimates that we have identified 27.5% to 69.6% of the total cropland expansion from 2000 to 2015 in Zambia (commission errors between 6.1% to 37.6%), depending on the slope threshold. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of Bayesian data fusion and shapelet, slope-based thresholding to synthesize optical and synthetic aperture radar for monitoring agricultural changes in situations where training data are scarce. In addition, the annual cropland maps provide one of the first spatially continuous, annually incremented accounts of cropland growth in this region. Our flexible, cloud-based workflow using GEE enables multi-sensor, national-scale agricultural change monitoring at low cost for users.
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Google Earth Engine: Cloud-Based Platform for Earth Observation Data and Analysis)
Publication Title
Remote Sensing
Publication Date
2022
Volume
14
Issue
19
ISSN
2072-4292
DOI
10.3390/rs14194896
Keywords
agriculture, Bayesian fusion, change detection, Google Earth Engine, Zambia
Repository Citation
Xiong, Sitian; Baltezar, Priscilla; Crowley, Morgan A.; Cecil, Michael; Crema, Stefano C.; Baldwin, Eli; Cardille, Jeffrey A.; and Estes, Lyndon, "Probabilistic tracking of annual cropland changes over large, complex agricultural landscapes using Google Earth engine" (2022). Geography. 48.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/48
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Conditions
© 2023 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
