Purpose and Scope of the WorldCereal system

Having access to reliable cropland and crop type masks is an important prerequisite for any agricultural monitoring activity, e.g. - crop yield estimation - damage assessment of (natural) disasters - evaluation of agricultural practices - assessement of crop water consumption

As such, cropland and crop type masks have been identified as one of the key Essential Agricultural Variables by the GEOGLAM community.

By the end of 2026, the WorldCereal project will generate new global cropland and crop type products for a single year, covering the following crop types: maize, winter cereals, spring cereals, sunflower, rapeseed, sorghum, millet, wheat, barley, rye and soybean.

The ultimate goal of the WorldCereal project is to make cropland and crop type mapping more accessible to the broader agricultural community by providing a flexible, open, user-friendly and cloud-based processing system for global cropland monitoring at high resolution.

The processing system will allow anyone to:

1. Consult the existing global cropland and crop type products, as generated by the WorldCereal project;

2. Retrieve open and harmonized reference data on land cover and crop types for use in your own applications;

3. Upload, harmonize and share own reference data on land cover and crop types;

4. Generate cropland masks for a custom area and growing season, based on our pre-trained cropland model;

5. Generate crop type maps for a custom area and growing season, using our pre-trained crop type models (default models are only available for the eleven supported crop types);

6. Train and apply custom cropland and crop type models for any area and growing season of interest. Custom models are not restricted in terms of cropland definition, nor available crop types. To train custom models, users are able to combine their own reference data with our public reference data.

Note on supported features:
The list above represents the targeted capabilities of the WorldCereal system.
To learn which features are already supported, visit our System overview page for more information!

As opposed to the first phase of the WorldCereal project, irrigation classification is NOT part of the processing system.