Abstract
Rice is the most important food crop in Vietnam, providing food more than 90 million people and is considered as an essential source of income for majority of rural populations. Monitoring rice-growing areas is thus important to developing successful strategies for food security in the country. This paper aims to develop an approach for crop acreage estimation from multi-temporal Sentinel-1A data. We processed the data for two main cropping seasons (e.g., winter–spring, summer–autumn) in the Mekong River Delta (MRD), Vietnam through three main steps: (1) data pre-processing, (3) rice classification based on crop phenological metrics, and (4) accuracy assessment of the mapping results. The classification results compared with the ground reference data indicated the overall accuracy of 86.2% and Kappa coefficient of 0.72. These results were reaffirmed by close correlation between the government’s rice area statistics for such crops (R<sup>2</sup> > 0.95). The values of relative error in area obtained for the winter–spring and summer–autumn were -3.6% and 6.7%, respectively. This study demonstrates the potential application of multi-temporal Sentinel-1A data for rice crop mapping using information of crop phenology in the study region.
Highlights
Rice is the most important food crop in Vietnam, providing food more than 90 million people and is an essential source of income for majority of rural populations
The mapping results indicated the spatial distributions of rice growing areas for the winter–spring and summer–autumn seasons in the study region (Figure 2)
The spatial distributions of rice were relatively scattered along the coastal areas because rice in these two seasons were basically practiced in the dry season, and soil salinity intrusion was a limiting factor to rice production in areas along the coastal zone
Summary
Rice is the most important food crop in Vietnam, providing food more than 90 million people and is an essential source of income for majority of rural populations. Due to pressures of population growth, rice production in the study region has been intensified to meet people’s food demands and economic development. Monitoring rice-growing areas is important to developing strategies for food security in the region. Previous studies of rice crop monitoring in the region were carried using coarse resolution satellite data, including MODIS and ENVSIAT data. There are limitations due to data contamination caused by cloud cover and mixed-pixel issues. This problem can be partly overcome by ENVISAT data. The Sentinel-1A satellite launched on 3 April 2014 gives the opportunity to collectively map small rice fields at different scales because the data have high spatial resolution of 10 m and temporal resolution of 12 days
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