Title: Comprehending Agricultural Landscapes at the National Level

Abstract:

Addressing pressing global issues related to resource management, climate change, and food security demands a holistic understanding of agricultural landscapes. This necessitates mapping not only crop plots but also essential elements such as water bodies and trees, which create a complex mosaic within the smallholder farming systems prevalent in the Global South. Existing attempts to produce such land-use maps have often fallen short, constrained by an exclusive emphasis on field delineation methods and a lack of robust post-processing protocols required for practical implementation. To date, no system has been successfully deployed and assessed at a national level for smallholder agriculture.

This study overcomes these barriers by introducing the inaugural national-scale agricultural mapping framework that transcends basic field outlining to facilitate the segmentation of various agricultural entities, including fields, trees, and water bodies. To guarantee accuracy and consistency for real-world use, the system incorporates innovative post-processing heuristics. Its efficacy is confirmed through a comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation. The high-resolution land-use maps produced by this system are available to the public via an API at http://agri.withgoogle.com, thereby supporting diverse applications ranging from precision farming and policy formulation to the advancement of global sustainability objectives.

Source: arXiv Generated at: 2026-06-02 00:00:00 UTC