Abstract

A Time to Sow: Mapping Crop Calendars for Africa
Track: Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Affairs
Authors: Zhe Guo

Obtaining a better understanding of the regional variation in local crop calendars is important to a large number of organizations and individuals who are concerned with production, marketing, processing and trade of food and feed products. Furthermore, as crop growth models are increasingly used to explore the likely effects of different input and management interventions on crop yield, a required input data is planting windows. Despite the importance of such information, there are limited sources of such data in a regional and global context. The objective of this study is to evaluate various existing crop calendar data products and to design a strategy to geo-reference and harmonize the best of them using spatial extensions. Existing datasets are digitized and geo-referenced using ArcGIS tools. Spatial analysis is applied to disaggregate and examine the relationships among different data sources, and Cropping Calendars are generated at a pixel scale for Africa.