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Land cover information plays a critical role in supporting sustainable development and informed decision-making. Recent advancements in satellite data accessibility, computing power, and satellite technologies have boosted large-extent high-resolution land cover mapping. However, retrieving a sufficient amount of reliable training data for the production of such land cover maps is typically a demanding task, especially using modern deep learning classification techniques that require larger training sample sizes compared to traditional machine learning methods. In view of the above, this study developed a new benchmark dataset called the Map of Land Cover Agreement (MOLCA). MOLCA was created by integrating multiple existing high-resolution land cover datasets through a consensus-based approach. Covering Sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and Siberia, this dataset encompasses approximately 117 billion 10m pixels across three macro-regions. The MOLCA legend aligns with most of the global high-resolution datasets and consists of nine distinct land cover classes. Noteworthy advantages of MOLCA include a higher number of pixels as well as coverage for typically underrepresented regions in terms of training data availability. With an estimated overall accuracy of 96%, MOLCA holds great potential as a valuable resource for the production of future high-resolution land cover maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mapping smallholder irrigated agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa using remote sensing techniques is challenging due to its small and scattered areas and heterogenous cropping practices. A study was conducted to examine the impact of sample size and composition on the accuracy of classifying irrigated agriculture in Mozambique's Manica and Gaza provinces using three algorithms: random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and artificial neural network (ANN). Four scenarios were considered, and the results showed that smaller datasets can achieve high and sufficient accuracies, regardless of their composition. However, the user and producer accuracies of irrigated agriculture do increase when the algorithms are trained with larger datasets. The study also found that the composition of the training data is important, with too few or too many samples of the "irrigated agriculture" class decreasing overall accuracy. The algorithms' robustness depends on the training data's composition, with RF and SVM showing less decrease and spread in accuracies than ANN. The study concludes that the training data size and composition are more important for classification than the algorithms used. RF and SVM are more suitable for the task as they are more robust or less sensitive to outliers than the ANN. Overall, the study provides valuable insights into mapping smallholder irrigated agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa using remote sensing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides recommendations on how large-scale household surveys should be conducted to generate the data needed to train models for satellite-based crop type mapping in smallholder farming systems. The analysis focuses on maize cultivation in Malawi and Ethiopia, and leverages rich, georeferenced plot-level data from national household surveys that were conducted in 2018–20 and integrated with Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and complementary geospatial data. To identify the approach to survey data collection that yields optimal data for training remote sensing models, 26,250 in silico experiments are simulated within a machine learning framework. The best model is then applied to map seasonal maize cultivation from 2016 to 2019 at 10-m resolution in both countries. The analysis reveals that smallholder plots with maize cultivation can be identified with up to 75% accuracy. Collecting full plot boundaries or complete plot corner points provides the best quality of information for model training. Classification performance peaks with slightly less than 60% of the training data. Seemingly little erosion in accuracy under less preferable approaches to georeferencing plots results in the total area under maize cultivation being overestimated by 0.16–0.47 million hectares (8–24%) in Malawi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]