AI and the World's Hard Problems · Earth & climate science · University of Cambridge · 2026-09-29
AI tool for mapping smallholder crops proves itself in Senegal
Senegal's small, rain-fed farms leave much of the population exposed to climate shocks, yet satellite crop-mapping tools are largely out of reach. University of Cambridge researchers used Tessera, an open-source AI model trained on satellite images, to map crops in Senegal's groundnut basin. In tests it gave the correct result 84% of the time, more accurate than current methods, while using only a fraction of the computing resources and labelled data. In one scenario it performed 28% better than the next-best model.