A Crop Group-Specific Pure Pixel Time Series for Europe

Christof J Weissteiner,Marijn Van Der Velde,Bettina Baruth,Josh Hooker,Giacinto Manfron,Grégory Duveiller,Raúl López-Lozano

doi:10.3390/rs11222668

Abstract

Long timeseries of Earth observation data for the characterization of agricultural crops across large scales are of high interest to crop modelers, scientists, and decision makers in the fields of agricultural and environmental policy as well as crop monitoring and food security. They are particularly important for regression-based crop monitoring systems that rely on historic information. The major challenge lies in identifying pixels from satellite imagery that represent pure enough crop signals. Here, we present a data-driven semi-automatic approach to identify pure pixels of two crop groups (i.e., winter and spring crops and summer crops) based on a MODIS–NDVI timeseries. We applied this method to the European Union at a 250 m spatial resolution. Pre-processed and smoothed, daily normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data (2001–2017) were used to first extract the phenological data. To account for regional characteristics (varying climate, agro-management, etc.), these data were clustered by administrative units and by year using a Gaussian mixture model. The number of clusters was pre-defined using data from regional agricultural acreage statistics. After automatic labelling, clusters were filtered based on agronomic knowledge and phenological information extracted from the same timeseries. The resulting pure pixels were validated with two different datasets, one based on high-resolution Sentinel-2 data (5 sites, 2 years) and one based on a regional crop map (1 site, 7 years). For the winter and spring crop class, pixel purity amounted to 93% using the first validation dataset and to 73% using the second one, averaged over the different years. For summer crops, the respective values were 61% (91% without one critical validation site) and 72%. The phenological analyses revealed a clear trend towards an earlier NDVI peak (approximately −0.28 days/year) for winter and spring crops across Europe. We expect that this dataset will be useful for various applications, from crop model calibration to operational crop monitoring and yield forecasting.

Highlights

Information on crop condition and yield at continental extents is of high importance to decision makers in the fields of agricultural and environmental policy as well as food security [1]
The results were obtained at the chosen NUTS-level (Table 1) for all European Union (EU) member countries except Malta and Finland, and for all years from 2001 to 2017
Due to the insufficient areas of arable land, the countries Malta and Finland and other single NUTS regions were automatically excluded from the analysis (e.g., Corsica in France or Berlin in Germany)

Summary

Introduction

Information on crop condition and yield at continental extents is of high importance to decision makers in the fields of agricultural and environmental policy as well as food security [1]. Such information is of even higher value if provided at regional (usually sub-national) scale. Remote sensing-dependent crop models are often run over large geographic extents with only an approximate knowledge of crop distribution This is due to the limitations in the spatial and temporal resolution of the remotely sensed and ground data [3], adding uncertainty and lowering model accuracy. Such crop model simulations could be considerably improved if fed with adequately geo-located and pure crop specific land cover data for every growing season [4,5]

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Conclusion