Syria Agricultural Degradation

Welcome to the CA-Syria's Agriculture and Land Monitoring Dashboard

Mercy Corps Syria Crisis Analysis Team

These two modules measure the health of agricultural land using distinct approaches that are useful for multiple purposes, including research and analysis, monitoring and evaluation, and program management.
The first module, the Agriculture Health Monitoring and Evaluation Tool allows users to draw farm outlines or upload shapefiles to visualize and statistically measure the change in vegetation health and water content, which is useful to identify problem areas in farm fields. The module also offers easy-to-use statistical tests (t-tests) that determine whether the change in vegetation health and plant water content is statistically significant. Further, the grouped tests are also available, allowing users to measure different agriculture interventions’ effectiveness in improving farm performance using objective satellite imagery indicators.
The second module, the Agriculture Degradation Tracking in Syria, features a new indicator describing the state of agriculture within small areas across the whole of Syria. The novel indicator quantifies the collective trends of several vegetation and soil health indicators and categorizes them into groups describing the overall “health” of agricultural land in each small area. These agriculture health categories are summarized at the sub-district level for targeting purposes, with the small area categorizations serving as a useful metric for targeting within a sub-district.
Data sources: Sentinel-1; Sentinel-2; Landsat 5/7/8/9

Select Comparison Periods

Welcome to the Syria Agricultural Degradation Module

Exclude low rainfall seasons, which are defined as growing seasons when rainfall levels were 15% or more below the long-run average.

All Seasons

Select Province:

Select District

About

This module categorize the change in cropland health across Syria over the past decade, specifically comparing three indicators of vegetation and soil health measured during the early conflict years (2012/2013 to 2017/2018) to measurements during the past 6 growing seasons (2018/2019 to 2023/2024).
Additional information about the cropland in each hexagon is also included when selecting a hexagon, including crop type (winter/summer/both), cropland water source (rainfed/irrigated/mix), and cropland activity level (fully active/partially active/etc.).
Above the sub-district map on the upper-left hand corner, there is a toggle to visualize calculations that exclude and include low rainfall seasons, which generates a set of indicators calculated during “normal” rainfall conditions and another set of indicators calculated using the entire dataset.

Step 1: Select a sub-district of interest by clicking on the map

Step 2: Select a hexagon within that sub-district by clicking on the map and find cropland health indicators and additional cropland details at the bottom of the screen. Click with Trend Layer activated to see additional information

Full Data