Generating high-resolution national crop distribution maps: Combining statistics, gridded data and surveys using an optimization approach

Detailed information on the location and size of crop area is essential for the assessment of agricultural production, food security and emissions resulting from land use change. Although, there exist several initiatives to produced spatially explicit crop distribution maps, these are generally too coarse for detailed country assessments, which require high resolution spatial maps. Using Malawi as a case-study and building on the Spatial Production Allocation Model (You et al. 2014), this paper presents an approach to produce high resolution crop distribution maps that incorporate all available information, including subnational agricultural statistics, crop specific land use information and national irrigation surveys