Title: Integrating Crowdsourcing, in situ Sensing, and Spaceborne Observation to Understand the Sustainability of Smallholder Agriculture in African Wet Savannas
Principal Investigator: Lyndon Estes
Funding Agency: NASA

Livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) rely heavily on small-scale farming. This dependence could deepen as SSA’s wetter savannas will be increasingly farmed to meet growing food demand, while economic growth strategies promote the expansion of smallholder farming. This large-scale, smallholder-based agricultural development in a region with a highly variable climate raises two important sustainability questions:

• Do strategies for increasing smallholders’ productivity increase or decrease their resilience to climatic variability?
• Will productivity gains minimize the amount of new land needed for agriculture?

The project will use a novel approach that integrates crowd-sourcing, in situ environmental sensing, and Earth Observing satellites to achieve three main objectives:

• Identify patterns of cropland change in smallholder farms.
• Identify landscape-scale trends in smallholder productivity.
• Understand the relationships among changes in crop productivity, land cover, and climatic
  variability.

The project focuses on maize farming in Zambia, a bellwether for regional agricultural development that has seen recent maize yield increases and farmland expansion.