Abstract
Monitoring the start of the crop season in Sahel provides decision makers with valuable information for an early assessment of potential production and food security threats. Presently, the most common method for the estimation of sowing dates in West African countries consists of applying given thresholds on rainfall estimations. However, the coarse spatial resolution and the possible inaccuracy of these estimations are limiting factors. In this context, the remote sensing approach, which consists of deriving green-up onset dates from satellite remote sensing data, appears as an interesting alternative. It builds upon a novel statistic model that translates vegetation onset detections derived from MODIS time series into sowing probabilities at the village level. Results for Niger show that this approach outperforms the standard method adopted in the region based on rainfall thresholds.
Highlights
In Sahel, agricultural yields rely, among other factors, on the length of the crop season
It shows for a series of buffer radius around villages (i) the percentage of the crop mask (CM) covered by village buffer mask (VBM), (ii) the percentage of VBM not covered by CM and (iii) the difference between both
For small buffers the percentage of CM covered by VBM increases faster than the percentage of VBM not covered by CM, and the opposite holds for large ones
Summary
In Sahel, agricultural yields rely, among other factors, on the length of the crop season. The most common method for the estimation of sowing dates in West African countries consists in applying given thresholds on rainfall quantity which is the main, even the only climatic factor affecting vegetation growth in Sahel. Following this agrometeorological approach, the assumption is that successful sowing occurs when rainfall exceeds 20 mm in a dekad (10-day period) and adds up to at least 20 mm in the following two dekads [2,6]. The limited reliability of this method is evidenced by the substantial effort the government still puts into in loco assessments of sowing dates in
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