Improved estimates of opium cultivation in Afghanistan using imagery-based stratification

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the US Government make extensive use of remote sensing to quantify and monitor trends in Afghanistan’s illicit opium production. Cultivation figures from their independent annual surveys can vary because of systematic differences in survey methodologies relating to spectral stratification and the addition of a pixel buffer to the agricultural area. We investigated the effect of stratification and buffering on area estimates of opium poppy using SPOT5 imagery covering the main opium cultivation area of Helmand province and sample data of poppy fields interpreted from very high resolution satellite imagery. The effect of resolution was investigated by resampling the original 10 m pixels to 20, 30, and 60 m, representing the range of available imagery. The number of strata (1, 4, 8, 13, 23, 40) and sample fraction (0.2–2%) used in the estimate were also investigated. Stratification reduced the confidence interval by improving the precision of estimates. Cultivation estimates of poppy using 40 spectral strata and a sample fraction of 1.1% had a similar precision to direct expansion estimates using a 2% sample fraction. Stratified estimates were more robust to changes in sample size and distribution. The mapping of the agricultural area had a significant effect on poppy cultivation estimates in Afghanistan, where the area of total agricultural production can vary significantly between years. The findings of this research explain differences in cultivation figures of the opium monitoring programmes in Afghanistan and recommendations can be applied to improve resource monitoring in other geographic areas.