2021-09-09, 15:35–15:55, HUGOTech
Gridded maps with information on the location of crops are essential to inform national food and agricultural policies and are an important input for land use change models. Despite rapid advancement in machine learning approaches to identify the location of crops, national and global level crop distribution maps that cover a large number of crops are not readily available yet, in particular for African countries. One of the most uses sources of crop distribution information is the IFPRI Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM, www.mapspam.info), which presents global-level plausible spatial estimates of the location of 40 crops (groups) that represent total agricultural production. SPAM uses a cross-entropy optimization approach to allocate national and subnational crop statistics of four production systems (subsistence, low-input, high-input, irrigated), informed by spatial information on both biophysical (e.g. crop suitability) and socio-economic (e.g. accessibility) drivers of crop location. This paper presents MAPSPAM-C, and R package that implements the SPAM procedure to create crop distribution maps and facilitates the pre-processing steps to harmonize spatial input layers and post-processing steps to create harvested area, physical area, yield and production maps. The package can be used to reproduce and validate the new generation of SPAM products and will be useful for researchers that want to create their own maps using country specific input data.
Liang You (IFPRI), Yating Ru (IFPRI), Ulrike Wood-Sichra (IFPRI)
Michiel van Dijk is a senior researcher at Wageningen Economic Research, part of Wageningen University and Research and a guest research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He previously held positions as associate professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, researcher at the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and West Africa campaigns officer at Oxfam Netherlands. From 2016 to 2020 he was a Research Scholar at IIASA. His research interests include the analysis of agricultural production, food security and climate change using a combination of global simulation models, micro-econometrics and spatial analysis. He has been a (lead) researcher in projects funded by CIMMYT, DFID, USAID, GEF, UNIDO, World Bank and the EU and has extensive working experience in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He holds a PhD in Technology and Development Studies from Eindhoven University of Technology and a MSc. in Quantitative Economics from Maastricht University.