Rainfed wheat extent (2020/21) across Ethiopia’s complex and highly fragmented agricultural smallholder landscape

Crop-type maps are critical for addressing food insecurity, yet national-scale, high-resolution maps of staple crops like wheat remain unavailable for many African countries due to limited, publicly available ground reference data. Ethiopia's complex and fragmented agricultural smallholder landscape and frequent cloud cover during rainfed seasons make crop mapping particularly challenging. This study presents the first national-scale, high-resolution wheat area map for Ethiopia, generated through a satellite-based workflow integrating (i) gap-filled, cloud-masked Sentinel-2 time series; (ii) Random Forest classification using temporal-spectral profiles and the EthCT2020 reference dataset; (iii) cropland masking; (iv) multistep validation; and (v) confidence-based consolidation with sub-national statistics. The resulting map estimates approximately 3.19 million hectares of wheat for the 2020/21 rainfed season, with 10 m spatial resolution and temporal coverage from April to December 2020. The dataset, openly accessible via CIMMYT Dataverse, provides a critical resource for operational wheat disease early warning and advisory systems in Ethiopia.