Small-scale (or small-holder) farms support the livelihoods and food security of people in many regions, but are often under-productive and typically exposed to substantial risk from climatic and other natural hazards. The socio-economic importance of these systems is likely to remain high, and even grow, as the number of small-scale farms increases as part of broader agriculture expansions underway in much of the developing world. Given their importance, there is a pressing need for solutions to boost both the productivity and resilience of small-scale agricultural systems. Key to addressing this need is the development of accurate, reliable, and scalable methods for measuring their productivity, distribution, and management, and how these might be changing over time. Developing such methods is a particular challenge for small-scale farming systems, as they are typically found in regions where background information is sparse, and their characteristics are notoriously difficult to estimate with remote sensing.
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies are dramatically increasing the ability to monitor and measure small-scale farms. These advances are being driven by rapid improvements in machine learning techniques, particularly deep learning, as well as the increasing capability and falling costs of collecting data at spatial and temporal scales relevant to small-scale farming over large extents. These include imagery collected from small satellites and other new Earth Observation constellations, as well as in situ sensors and in field observations enabled by smartphone technology, amongst many others.
In this Research Topic, we invite submissions that demonstrate how AI can be combined with new data collection technologies to improve the ability to monitor, measure, and/or manage small-scale farms. We are particularly interested in approaches that have only become feasible in the past 3-5 years. Some potential topics of interest include:
• Large area mapping of small-scale croplands using satellites and deep learning models
• Application of AI to satellite time series to map land use and land cover change in small-scale systems, including crop types and field dynamics
• AI-assisted upscaling of on-farm sensor observations through drones to satellites
• Multi-sensor data fusion approaches to enhance AI-based agricultural mapping and monitoring
• AI-based combination of multi-source, variable quality field observations to detect agricultural signals (e.g. pest events, management activities)
• Combining AI and process-based models to improve estimation of smallholder yields
Papers may cover a variety of geographies and farming systems, as well as a broad range of scales and observational perspectives. We commit to reviewing each submission in a thorough, fair, and constructive manner. We strongly encourage authors to publish their code and data along with their accepted papers. We particularly encourage the submission of training datasets to the
Radiant MLHub repository.
Upon finalization of this collection, we will select one of the published submissions for the best paper award, which in addition to the recognition will include a waiver for a future submission in
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
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Participants in the
Agriculture Vision workshop held in conjunction with the IEEE CVPR 2022 conference are encouraged to submit extended versions of short conference papers to this topic.
The Topic Editors would like to acknowledge Dr. Catherine Nakalembe from the University of Maryland for providing the cover image.