Agricultural cropland extent and areas of South Asia derived using Landsat satellite 30-m time-series big-data using random forest machine learning algorithms on the Google Earth Engine cloud

The South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bhutan) has a staggering 900 million
\npeople (~43% of the population) who face food insecurity or severe food insecurity as per United
\nNations, Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES). The
\nexisting coarse-resolution (≥250-m) cropland maps lack precision in geo-location of individual farms
\nand have low map accuracies. This also results in uncertainties in cropland areas calculated fromsuch
\nproducts. Thereby, the overarching goal of this study was to develop a high spatial resolution (30-m
\nor better) baseline cropland extent product of South Asia for the year 2015 using Landsat satellite
\ntime-series big-data and machine learning algorithms (MLAs) on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud
\ncomputing platform. To eliminate the impact of clouds, 10 time-composited…