Earth ID: 3646

2009 Crop Intensity, 2009 Producers, and 2050 Projected Population

Visualizations by Lori Perkins Released on October 5, 2009

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to strengthen collaboration. In support of this collaboration, NASA and the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) jointly funded a new project to assimilate NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data and products into an existing decision support system (DSS) operated by the International Production Assessment Division (IPAD) of FAS. To meet its objectives, FAS/IPAD uses satellite data and data products to monitor agriculture worldwide and to locate and keep track of natural disasters such as short and long term droughts, floods and persistent snow cover which impair agricultural productivity. FAS is the largest user of satellite imagery in the non-military sector of the U.S. government. For the last 20 years FAS has used a combination of Landsat and NOAA-AVHRR satellite data to monitor crop condition and report on episodic events.

To successfully monitor worldwide agricultural regions and provide accurate agricultural production assessments, it is important to understand the spatial distribution of croplands. To do this a global croplands mask to identify all sites used for crop production. Croplands are highly variable both temporally and spatially. Croplands vary from year to year due to events such as drought and fallow periods, and they vastly differ across the globe in accordance with characteristics such as cropping intensity and field size. A flexible crop likelihood mask is used to help depict these varying characteristics of global crop cover. Regions featuring intensive agro-industrial farming practices such as the Maize Triangle in South Africa will have higher confidence values in the crop mask as compared to less intensively farmed regions in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where cropland identification is partly confounded with natural background vegetation phenologies. Thus, a customized threshold can be employed to examine areas of varying cropping intensification.

Twenty six countries produce 82% of the world's grain according to the FAS. These countries are highlighted in yellow.

The world crop producers are shown in yellow contrasted with an overlay of the places the United Nations projects to double or triple their population in the year 2050. The countries that are least able to feed themselves now are growing in population the most.

Visualization Credits

Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC): Lead Animator
Michelle Williams (UMBC): Producer
Chris Justice (University of Maryland): Scientist
Inbal Becker Reshef (University of Maryland): Scientist

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

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https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3646

Mission:
Terra

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