Using global land cover data to assess regional food production potential

With over 900 million people living undernourished, food insecurity is one of the most important issues facing society today. In this study, we show how global Earth observation data can be used in concert with a variety of sources of information to consider both where and how additional food might be grown on already cultivated lands. In a previous study, we used global, gridded crop yield data derived in part from MODIS and GLC2000 land cover datasets, along with observed twentieth century global, gridded average climate data to determine how the yields of 18 dominant crops compare across regions with similar climate. In this study we move from the global scale, and focus on regions such as Western and Eastern Europe that have similar climates yet significantly different crop yields. We investigate the cause of these differences by considering additional drivers of crop yields such as fertilizer use, availability of crop varieties, agricultural subsidies, and land tenure. We provide a framework to integrate these agronomic, socioeconomic, political, and land use datasets with the biophysical factors already taken into account. We also consider additional biophysical parameters such as topography and soil conditions, as well as inter-annual climate variability. With this work, we aim to highlight how the recent availability of global land cover datasets can be used to improve our understanding of our prospect for increasing food availability, and how it is constrained by both natural and human-related factors.