Abstract
The agricultural sector in Libya is facing a significant challenge due to acute water scarcity, especially as the country’s economy is highly dependent upon agriculture. In response, the "OSRO/LIB/002/ITA" project is dedicated to enhancing the monitoring, evaluation, and rationalization of the sector’s water usage. Rationalizing water use in agriculture is intrinsically linked to land cover and crop type mapping. Moreover, understanding the specific crops grown is crucial for efficient water management. Therefore, updated information on the land cover and crop type is needed to monitor Libya’s water and agricultural productivity. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration with national institutions, has led the mapping activities, starting in 2022. Consolidated methodologies and standards on land cover mapping were adopted to generate a consistent and harmonized product using geospatial technologies. The land cover legend was been prepared using the national land cover reference system (Nwer et al., 2023).1 Sentinel-2 images (10 m resolution) from 2022 to 2023 were classified using supervised classification in FAO’s System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring (SEPAL) platform (FAO, 2020)2 to prepare an updated national land cover map. The crop mask was then extracted from the land cover map. Field data collection was conducted to collect the crop type reference data. For the crop type mapping, Sentinel-2 images from 2022 and 2023 (Earth Engine, 2019)3 and field data were used. 750 sampling points were collected for the validation of the crop type map, and showed that the overall accuracy of the crop type map was 83 percent. The national land cover map consists of nine classes, including shrubland, grassland, cultivated rainfed areas, cultivated irrigated areas, artificial surfaces, natural surfaces, water, Terrestrial natural and semi natural aquatic or regularly flooded vegetation, and tree-dominated areas. Results show that the largest land cover area in Libya is natural surfaces (approximately 158 million hectares (ha), or 98 percent of the total land cover area in Libya). The total agricultural or cultivated area in Libya is approximately 2.1 million ha or 1.32 percent of the total land cover area, which includes arable land and permanent crops. The crop type map consists of fourteen classes including, olive trees, date palm trees, herbaceous crops (with a focus on alfalfa), tuberous vegetable crops, cereal crops such as wheat, barley, and oat, fruit plantations, other vegetables, other fruit trees, combined wheat and barley crops, and sweet pepper, peanut, and onion crops. The total area of the 14 different types of crops is estimated at 613 170 ha by remote sensing and field data, which presents a minor difference when compared with the FAOSTAT data (FAO, 2023)4 (i.e. 647 526 ha for the same crops and period of 2022–2023). This publication aims to provide guidance to practitioners, decision-makers and researchers for improved planning for water resource management, agricultural productivity and sustainable land use practices.