29830fe5-47c2-446e-b19b-745c2273f5eb eng Mr. Varun Tiwari ICIMOD, SERVIR-HKH Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Analyst varun.tiwari@icimod.org 2026-01-22T16:24:05 North American Profile of ISO 19115:2003 WGS 1984 Wheat Sown Areas in Afghanistan 2017 2017-12-31 Mr. Varun Tiwari ICIMOD, SERVIR-HKH Remote Sensing and Geoinformation Analyst 977-1-5275222 Nepal varun.tiwari@icimod.org ICIMOD. (2020). Wheat Sown Areas in Afghanistan 2017 [Data set]. ICIMOD. https://doi.org/10.26066/RDS.35990 Wheat is cultivated on more than 2.7 million hectares in Afghanistan annually, yet the country is dependent on imports to meet domestic demand. The timely estimation of domestic wheat production is highly critical to address any potential food security issues and has been identified as a priority by the Ministry of Agriculture Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL). In this study, we developed a system for in-season mapping of wheat crop area based on both optical (Sentinel-2) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR, Sentinel-1) data to support estimation of wheat cultivated area for management and food security planning. Utilizing a 2010 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) cropland mask, wheat sown area for 2017 was mapped integrating decision trees and machine learning algorithms in the Google Earth Engine cloud platform. Information from provincial crop calendars in addition to training and validation data from field-based surveys, and high-resolution Digitalglobe and Airbus Pleiades images were used for classification and validation. The total irrigated and rainfed wheat area were estimated as 912,525 and 562,611 ha, respectively for 2017. Province-wise accuracy assessments show the maximum accuracy of irrigated (IR) and rainfed (RF) wheat across provinces was 98.76 and 99%, respectively, whereas the minimum accuracy was found to be 48% (IR) and 73% (RF). The lower accuracy is attributed to the unavailability of reference data, cloud cover in the satellite images and overlap of spectral reflectance of wheat with other crops, especially in the opium poppy growing provinces. While the method is designed to provide estimation at different stages of the growing season, the best accuracy is achieved at the end of harvest using time-series satellite data for the whole season. The approach followed in the study can be used to generate wheat area maps for other years to aid in food security planning and policy decisions. Detail methodology and data quality information are described in the published article (Tiwari et.al 2020, Wheat Area Mapping in Afghanistan Based on Optical and SAR Time-Series Images in Google Earth Engine Cloud Environment, https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2020.00077) Location based data for establishing the baseline statistics for wheat sown area in Afghanistan at national scale. This dataset has been developed by SERVIR Himalaya. SERVIR is a joint USAID-NASA project. For more information on SERVIR, visit http://www.servirglobal.net. For references, use: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), SERVIR Himalaya. http://rds.icimod.org:8080/geonetwork/srv/eng/resources.get?uuid=29830fe5-47c2-446e-b19b-745c2273f5eb&fname=WheatMap2017_s.png thumbnail png http://rds.icimod.org:8080/geonetwork/srv/eng/resources.get?uuid=29830fe5-47c2-446e-b19b-745c2273f5eb&fname=WheatMap2017.png large_thumbnail png Food Security Wheat Sown Area Agriculture GEOSS THEME Geo-Group on Earth Observation Nepal secretariat@geosec.org http://www.earthobservations.org/index.shtml WWW:LINK-1.0-http--related Earth Observation SERVIR-HKH servircat icimod-servir Afghanistan geossDataCore Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) The SERVIR Project, NASA, USAID and ICIMOD make no express or implied warranty of this data as to the merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Neither the US Government nor its contractors shall be liable for special, consequential or incidental damages attributed to this data. Users are permitted to copy, use, adapt, and redistribute SERVIR data without limitations. SERVIR encourages users to keep any adapted or redistributed versions of this data freely available for public use. eng geoscientificInformation 60.517 74.8898 29.3772 38.4908 ICIMOD 977-1-5275222 metadata@icimod.org