Highlights• In North Africa, collective successions applied to groups of fields contribute to the homogenization of crop distribution at the landscape level. • Remotely sensed land use time series allow the identification of clusters of adjacent fields with the same type of crop succession. • It is possible to assess whether a cluster results from a collective succession using a spatial permutation test. • The approach developed is a tool to help define land use scenarios that take into account collective successions for better acceptability by farmers.