Crop diversity - number of crop types

Crop conditions monitoring is highly relevant for food security early warning and response planning in food-insecure areas of the world. GEOGLAM (the Group on Earth Observations' Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative) aims to reinforce the international community's capacity to produce and disseminate relevant, timely, and accurate forecasts of agricultural production at national, regional, and global scales using Earth Observation data. Copernicus4GEOGLAM, one of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Services managed by the EC Joint Research Centre, aims to produce baseline information that allows countries in Africa to improve their agricultural monitoring systems. Building upon the Joint Research Centre’s frameworks for utilizing Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) resources to evaluate agroecological performance, this spatial dataset provides critical baseline intelligence on cropping systems to support resilience assessment and food security planning for a selected region in Kenya,. The dataset comprises two layers:

• Number of Crop Types (Crop Richness): The absolute count of distinct cultivated crop species within a given spatial resolution. Crop richness serves as a fundamental baseline indicator of agricultural variety. It allows analysts to rapidly distinguish between highly vulnerable monoculture landscapes and more traditional, diverse multi-cropping or intercropping systems present in the Kenyan study area.
• Crop Diversity (Shannon Diversity Index): Going beyond a simple count, the Shannon Diversity Index evaluates both the abundance (the number of different crop types) and the evenness (the proportional spatial distribution of those crops). A higher index value indicates a highly diverse and balanced cropping ecosystem. Because evenly diverse systems are typically more resilient to climate volatility, pests, and diseases, this layer is a vital proxy for assessing local agroecological health.