Evaluating the Impact of Field Heterogeneity on Food Security Assessment in Tanzania
Abstract
Sufficient food production serves as a foundation for food security. Accurate estimation of food production, which includes estimation for both crop yield and arable areas, is particularly important for African countries. One of the recent advances in yield estimation algorithm was to incorporate satellite imageries and crop simulation models to achieve yield estimation with large spatial coverage. But medium-resolution satellite imageries (e.g. 30m Landsat and 10m Sentinel imageries) neglect heterogeneity within a field. Treating a field as a homogenous unit in yield estimation procedure for the smallholder farms can lead to inaccurate yield estimate and thus incorrect assessment of food production and food security. Evaluating field heterogeneity and its impact on food security assessment for smallholder farming systems in African countries is missing. This study aims at filling this research gap.
The objectives of this study were to demonstrate within-field variability in corn plant conditions and to quantify the effect of satellite-image resolution on assessing field heterogeneity and on estimating corn yield in Tanzania. We used field data collected across three districts in Tanzania in 2017 to demonstrate the highly diverse within-field conditions. We then compared corn yield estimates derived from Landsat (30m), Sentinel-2 (10m) versus PlanetScope (3m) imageries. Lastly, we estimated food production based on the yields derived from various satellite imageries and areas of arable land from the national report.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC51G1154L
- Keywords:
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- 0426 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 9305 Africa;
- GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION;
- 1616 Climate variability;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1878 Water/energy interactions;
- HYDROLOGY