Retrieving the National Main Commodity Maps in Indonesia Based on High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Data Using Cloud Computing Platform

Abstract

Indonesia has the most favorable climates for agriculture because of its location in the tropical climatic zones. The country has several commodities to support economics growth that are driven by key export commodities—e.g., oil palm, rubber, paddy, cacao, and coffee. Thus, identifying the main commodities in Indonesia using spatially-explicit tools is essential to understand the precise productivity derived from the agricultural sectors. Many previous studies have used predictions developed using binary maps of general crop cover. Here, we present national commodity maps for Indonesia based on remote sensing data using Google Earth Engine. We evaluated a machine learning algorithm—i.e., Random Forest to parameterize how the area in commodity varied in Indonesia. We used various predictors to estimate the productivity of various commodities based on multispectral satellite imageries (36 predictors) at 30-meters spatial resolution. The national commodity map has a relatively high accuracy, with an overall accuracy of about 95% and Kappa coefficient of about 0.90. The results suggest that the oil palm plantation was the highest commodity product that occupied the largest land of Indonesia. However, this study also showed that the land area in rubber, rice paddies, and cacao commodities was underestimated due to its lack of training samples. Improvement in training data collection for each commodity should be done to increase the accuracy of the commodity maps. The commodity data can be viewed online (website can be found in the end of conclusions). This data can further provide significant information related to the agricultural sectors to investigate food provisioning, particularly in Indonesia.

Agroforestry as Policy Option for Forest-Zone Oil Palm Production in Indonesia

“…The breakdowns of oil palm areas varied, with one study differentiating 'industrial' and 'smallholder' oil palm [33], while another study [75] focused on oil palm areas within forest zone lands. Condro et al [28] mapped major commodities including coffee and cacao, and obtained area estimates close to the data from the Ministry of Agriculture. Across Indonesia, the largest oil palm areas are in Sumatra and the second largest in Kalimantan, covering respectively 6.4 M ha and 4.9 M ha in 2018 [74], while another study [75] mentioned 10.5 M ha and 5.7 M ha, respectively, for these two islands.…”

“…Some of the agroforests in [32] are mapped by [31] as disturbed forest, and that was the main differentiating factor of forest and agroforest areas in the two maps. Major commodities of oil palm and rubber are negligible in West Kalimantan's Forest-zone lands, the highest being oil palm in Production Forest areas (4%) mapped by [28]. In Jambi, agroforest occupied 19% of the land with Production Forest status, and <10% for Protection Forest and Conservation Areas [31] (Table 3).…”

“…In Jambi, agroforest occupied 19% of the land with Production Forest status, and <10% for Protection Forest and Conservation Areas [31] (Table 3). Rubber and oil palm monocultures were <10% in all Forest-zone land categories in Jambi [28,33]. A breakdown of FZ-OP by elevation and forest category ( Figure A1) shows most are below 100 m above sea level.…”

“…Probability of land having oil palm as land cover at four elevation zones (0 = 0-100; 1 = 100-300; 2 = 300-1000; 3 = >1000 m a.s.l.) in two provinces ((A-C), West Kalimantan; (D,E) Jambi), for specified land use designations outside and inside the forest-zone, according to three data sources ((A) [75]; (B,D) [33]; (C,E) [28]); (NB log scale on the X-axis).…”

“…To the forest authorities, the numbers are a clear sign of illegality, as current rules do not allow oil palm to be planted within the forest zone as FZ-OP. Actually, oil palms are the most readily recognizable of the four major tree crops (coffee, cocoa, rubber and oil palm) that occur both outside and inside the forest zone [28], but part of the smallholder oil palm may be part of a finer-grained mosaic and not as easily noticeable. Key questions regarding FZ-OP are: (1) What came first: local land use or designation of the land as part of the forest zone?, (2) How does the land use with tree crops relate to the primary designated forest function in (A) production forest (income generation), (B) protection forest (watershed protection) and (C) Conservation areas (Biodiversity), with recent additional interests in restricting drainage of peat soils in the production forest zone, (3) How do the various stakeholders along the palm-oil value chain respond to the lack of legality of forest-based oil palm production?…”