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New Farm Maps Offer In-Depth Picture of

Global Agriculture
by Becky Oskin, Senior Writer | January 20, 2015 10:49am ET
All farmers on the ground know their land as well as their own wrinkled hands, but
totaling up all the world's cropland is a difficult task. Yet the competitively for land among
developers, growers and other parties makes getting an accurate count of the world's arable
acres especially important as the planet's population grows.
Two new maps released Friday (Jan. 16) considerably improve estimates of the amount
of land farmed in the world one map reveals the world's agricultural lands to a resolution
of 1 kilometer, and the other provides the first look at the sizes of the fields being used for
agriculture, the researchers said. Earlier studies estimated that the world's cropland may cover
an area between 1.22 billion and 1.71 billion hectares, a range that varies by more than 40
percent.
"The field-size map is really unique no such global product currently exists," study
co-author Linda See, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis in Austria, said in a statement.
The researchers built the cropland database by combining information from several
sources, such as satellite images, regional maps, video and geotagged photos, which were
shared with them by groups around the world. Combining all that information would be an
almost-impossible task for a handful of scientists to take on, so the team turned the project
into a crowdsourced, online game. Voluntary logged into "Cropland Capture" on a computer
or a phone and determined whether an image contained cropland or not. Participants were
entered into weekly prize drawings.
The new global cropland map shows the extent of land dedicated to farming in 2005, and the
field-size map illustrates different approaches to farming. It turns out that medium and large
fields dominate in North America, central South America, Europe and Australia, while small
fields pepper the farming regions in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and China.

The researchers said they hope the global cropland map will becomes a reference map for
climate modelers, as well as agencies that monitor and report on agricultural development
worldwide. The field-size map is more a rough first step in looking at the world's fields, but
offers a new way to monitor global agriculture, the scientists said. For instance, a growth in
field sizes in a certain region could reflect a shift there toward development and
mechanization.

"Current sources of information on cropland extent are not accurate enough for most
applications," study lead author Steffen Fritz said in the statement. "The global cropland map
is a low-cost solution to fill this need."

Both maps are free to download from the "Cropland Capture" game host website, called GeoWiki, with online registration. The researchers are now producing a new cropland map for
2010, and update the field-size map, they said.

The maps were also published in the journal Global Changes Biology.