Mapping smallholder irrigation in Mozambique

At a glance
Where	Gaza and Manica provinces, Mozambique (Chokwe, Xai-Xai, Manica, Catandica, Messica)
When	2019 to now
For	FASIMO programme and the Mozambican government, Wageningen University (PhD), Resilience BV
Data & tools	Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Digital Earth Africa, Google Earth Engine, R, field data with Open Data Kit
My role	Remote sensing method, maps and reports. Field data collection and training

Many smallholder farmers in Mozambique irrigate. They dig their own canals, use buckets or small pumps, and grow vegetables close to a river. Most of this never ends up in official statistics, so it is also missing when governments plan water use. Mapping it from space sounds easy and isn’t. The fields are small, mixed with rainfed crops, and look different from one valley to the next.

For the FASIMO programme (farmer-led and smallholder irrigation in Gaza and Manica, 12 schemes and about 1,000 farmers) I developed the remote sensing method and wrote the reports on irrigated area. They became a practical basis for government water resource planning in Mozambique.

My PhD went deeper into the method. Algorithm, training data, composite length and model transfer between regions each change the result. Two analysts can make two quite different maps of the same area. So I also proposed a reporting framework, so readers can see which choices were made.

In Messica we tested what Sentinel-1 radar adds to Sentinel-2 in dense time series. I used Sentinel-1 from Digital Earth Africa in the workflow and learned where SAR helps, and where its temporal and spatial scale limits it for this kind of small-field mapping.

The newest step is geospatial foundation model embeddings. At the WaterNet symposium in 2026 I presented a comparison of Sentinel-2 with AlphaEarth and TESSERA embeddings, and how far models built on them transfer between regions and years.

Last updated on Nov 10, 2026