Mapping smallholder cashew plantations to inform sustainable tree crop expansion in Benin

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00363v1
• Date: Sun, 1 Jan 2023 07:18:47 GMT
• Title: Mapping smallholder cashew plantations to inform sustainable tree crop expansion in Benin
• Authors: Leikun Yin, Rahul Ghosh, Chenxi Lin, David Hale, Christoph Weigl, James Obarowski, Junxiong Zhou, Jessica Till, Xiaowei Jia, Troy Mao, Vipin Kumar, Zhenong Jin
• Abstract summary: Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide. Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, we produced the first national map of cashew in Benin.
• Score: 4.008214303620168
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.

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