Crop Mask Title:
Unified Cropland 2014 V2.3

Coverage:
Global

Spatial resolution:
250 meters

Satellite:
Derived from a variety of crop masks generated from a variety of satellites (MODIS, MERIS, Landsat, etc.)

Year:
2014

Version:
The Unified Cropland mask is version 2.3.

Organization:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
This research was conducted in the framework of the SIGMA (Stimulating Innovation for Global Monitoring of Agriculture and its Impact on the Environment in support of GEOGLAM) project funded by the European Commission in the Seventh Programme for research.

Resource Contact:
François Waldner
francois.waldner@uclouvain.be

Resource Abstract:
Accurate and timely information on the global cropland extent is critical for food security monitoring, water management and earth system modeling. Principally, it allows for analyzing satellite image time-series to assess the crop conditions and permits isolation of the agricultural component to focus on food security and impacts of various climatic scenarios. However, despite its critical importance, accurate information on the spatial extent, cropland mapping with remote sensing imagery remains a major challenge. Following an exhaustive identification and collection of existing land cover maps, a multi-criteria analysis was designed at the country level to evaluate the fitness of a cropland map with regards to four dimensions: its timeliness, its legend, its resolution adequacy and its confidence level. As a result, a Unified Cropland Layer that combines the fittest products into a 250-m global cropland map was assembled. With an evaluated accuracy ranging from 82% to 95%, the Unified Cropland Layer successfully improved the accuracy compared to single global products.

Resource Classification Categories:
Pixel values range from 0 to 100, where 0 represents non cropped pixels and 100 corresponds to fully cropped pixels.

Reprocessing for MODIS-GLAM (250-meter) applications:
The 250-m Unified crop mask was reprocessed for cropland data drilling on MODIS-GLAM. The processing steps follow:

No resampling was necessary because the original spatial resolution of 250-meters is the same resolution as the MODIS-GLAM system.
Pixels with crop area fraction ranging from 5-95 percent were set to a binary value of 1.
Above binary data set used to cropland data drill by administrative unit.

Resource URL:
https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5729/1/1/3

Download URL:
https://figshare.com/articles/ucl_2014_v2_0_tif/2066742

Resource Citations:
Waldner, F., et al, 2016. A Unified Cropland Layer at 250 m for Global Agriculture Monitoring, Data, 1 (2016), p. 3