Remote sensing applied to cocoa crop identification, a thematic review

This article presents a thematic review of 25 publications related to the use of remote sensing techniques for the identification of cocoa crops from 2000 to 2023. Although the use of remote sensing techniques is widely used for mapping different covers because it is very useful in discriminating them, the generation of maps of cocoa crops presents challenges due to their spectral behavior similar to that of forests. This is because cocoa cultivation, being an agroforestry system that is developed in association with timber trees, causes the classification algorithms used to fail to differentiate between forest cover and cocoa crops. For this reason, this study seeks to investigate the different remote sensing techniques used in the mapping of cocoa crops, as well as an analysis of the structure of the publications highlighting the connections between countries and the factors that motivated the authors to research this crop.