Monitoring food security in Malawi using drone and satellite imagery

Climate change affects countries across the globe. Due to high population growth, rapid deforestation, and widespread soil erosion, Malawi's agriculturally-based economy is particularly susceptible to climate change's negative consequences. Increased drought conditions and other factors greatly reduced the national harvest, leading to the deficit of food production. High inflation, high food prices and limited opportunity for income-earning work resulted in Some 6.7 million people now need urgent food or cash support while 37% of children are stunted. UNICEF has a program to explore the use of drone in development works which provides an opportunity to monitor and map crops in Malawi at a very high spatial resolution (up to 4 cm). To monitor current and historic food situation in a quantitative manner, this study aims at taking advantage of the rich spatial details in drone imagery and to combine them with satellite imagery which provides comprehensive, large area observation. In order to achieve this goal: First, we test the possibility of using drone data as the replacement for the ground truth data collected by human enumerators in classifying European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 data. Second, we explore the possibility of applying knowledge gained from drone imagery in building a crop types classification model for satellite imagery. Finally, we use historical Earth observation data to monitor agriculture area change. The results of this study are expected to greatly enhance our ability to understand the causality between climate change and food insecurity in Malawi.