Annual and in-season mapping of cropland at field scale with sparse labels

Spatial information about where crops are being grown, known as cropland maps, are critical inputs for analyses and decision-making related to food security and climate change. Despite a widespread need for readily-updated annual and inseason cropland maps at the management (field) scale, these maps are unavailable for most regions at risk of food insecurity. This is largely due to lack of in-situ labels for training and validating machine learning classifiers. Previously, we developed a method for binary classification of cropland that learns from sparse local labels and abundant global labels using a multi-headed LSTM and timeseries multispectral satellite inputs over one year. In this work, we present a new method that uses an autoregressive LSTM to classify cropland during the growing season (i.e., partially-observed time series). We used these methods to produce publicly-available 10m-resolution cropland maps in Kenya for the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 growing seasons. These are the highest-resolution and most recent cropland maps publicly available for Kenya. These methods and associated maps are critical for scientific studies and decision-making at the intersection of food security and climate change.

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Recommended citation: Tseng, G., Kerner, H., Nakalembe, C., and Becker-Reshef, I. (2020). "Annual and in-season mapping of cropland at field scale with sparse labels." Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020 Workshops (Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning).