Crop Mapping Research Articles

Optimizing crop monitoring: mapping cultivation stages and types with sentinel-1/2 and random forest algorithm

ABSTRACT Crop-type mapping is essential for agricultural monitoring, improving crop yield models, and supporting sustainable land management. Studying crop phenology, which includes the timing from germination to maturity, is equally important for precise agricultural practices. However, maps detailing crop phenology are scarce. This study addresses this gap by mapping both crop types and cultivation time, offering valuable insights for agriculture applications. The research integrates Sentinel-1/2 data, NDVI phenology curves, and machine learning (ML) algorithms through Google Earth Engine to map crops in El-Behera Governorate, Egypt. By stratifying the region into different soil types, it accounts for various agro-environmental conditions. Field visits in July 2022 provided crop-type information, and Sentinel-2 NDVI curves were used to determine cultivation time. The random forest (RF) classifier, known for its accuracy, was employed, achieving an overall accuracy (OA) of 97.4% for crop type and 95.6% for cultivation time, with high Kappa coefficients. Feature importance analysis highlighted the significance of specific spectral bands, particularly in the Red Edge region, for classification accuracy. Hyperparameter tuning across different zones demonstrated the need for customized tuning. This study enhances understanding of agro-environmental variability’s impact on crop classification and shows the potential of the RF algorithm in advancing crop mapping, suggesting further studies on how shifts in cultivation time could affect crop yield.

Precision crop mapping: within plant canopy discrimination of crop and soil using multi-sensor hyperspectral imagery

Leveraging diverse optomechanical and imaging technologies for precision agriculture applications is gaining attention in emerging economies. The precise spatial detection of plant objects in farms is crucial for optimizing plant-level nutrition and managing pests and diseases. High-resolution remote sensors mounted on drones have been increasingly deployed for large-scale crop mapping and field variability characterization. While field-level crop identification and crop-soil discrimination have been studied extensively, within-plant canopy discrimination of crop and soil has not been explored in real agricultural farms. The objectives of this study are: (i) adoption and assessment of spectral unmixing for discriminating crop and soil at within-plant canopy level, and (ii) generation of benchmark terrestrial and drone-based hyperspectral datasets for plant or sub-plant level discrimination using various spectral mixture modelling approaches and sources of endmembers. We acquired hyperspectral imagery of vegetable crops using a frame-based sensor mounted on a drone flying at different heights. Further, several linear, non-linear, and sparse-based spectral unmixing methods were used to discriminate plant and soil based on spectral signatures (endmembers) extracted from different spectral libraries prepared using in situ or field, ground-based, and drone-based hyperspectral imagery. The results, validated against pixel-to-pixel ground truth data, indicate an overall crop-soil discrimination accuracy of 99–100%, subject to a combination of endmember source and flying height. The influences of different endmember sources, spatial resolution as indicated by flying height, and inversion algorithms on the quality of estimated abundances are assessed from a verifiable and functionally relevant perspective. The generated hyperspectral datasets and ground truth data can be used for developing and testing new methods for sub-canopy level soil-crop discrimination in various agricultural applications of remote sensing.

Winter wheat identification in China through FY-3D NDVI&EVI satellite data and DNN Fusion

ABSTRACT Medium Resolution Spectral Imager-II (MERSI-II) on FengYun 3D (FY-3D) meteorological satellite is a visible and infrared spectral imaging instrument comparable with Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), which provides ample opportunities for regional crop mapping. However, current research may have overlooked the potential of combining FY-3D MERSI-II data with deep neural network (DNN) algorithms for winter wheat identification. This research utilizes a DNN method to train a nonlinear model with the synthetic normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI) at a 250 m resolution from FY-3D MERSI-II as the eigenvalues, enabling to accurately identify spatial distribution of winter wheat in China’s main production regions and filling the gap in the application of FY-3D MERSI-II data. The results indicate that the winter wheat identification with the combination of NDVI and EVI achieved an accuracy of 95.32%, with a Kappa coefficient of 0.87 and a determination coefficient (R 2 ) of 0.73, improving the overall accuracy by 1.27% and 1.07% compared to models trained solely using NDVI or EVI, respectively. In terms of spatial distribution, the overlap rate with the winter wheat dataset of China from MODIS at a 500 m resolution exceeded 95%, with an area bias of 2.67%. This study indicates that the medium resolution FY-3D MERSI-II remote sensing dataset combined with the DNN algorithm can accurately identify crop information over large areas.

Evaluating Flood Damage to Paddy Rice Fields Using PlanetScope and Sentinel-1 Data in North-Western Nigeria: Towards Potential Climate Adaptation Strategies

Floods are significant global disasters, but their impact in developing countries is greater due to the lower shock tolerance, many subsistence farmers, land fragmentation, poor adaptation strategies, and low technical capacity, which worsen food security and livelihoods. Therefore, accurate and timely monitoring of flooded crop areas is crucial for both disaster impact assessments and adaptation strategies. However, most existing methods for monitoring flooded crops using remote sensing focus solely on estimating the flood damage, neglecting the need for adaptation decisions. To address these issues, we have developed an approach to mapping flooded rice fields using Earth observation and machine learning. This approach integrates high-resolution multispectral satellite images with Sentinel-1 data. We have demonstrated the reliability and applicability of this approach by using a manually labelled dataset related to a devastating flood event in north-western Nigeria. Additionally, we have developed a land suitability model to evaluate potential areas for paddy rice cultivation. Our crop extent and land use/land cover classifications achieved an overall accuracy of between 93% and 95%, while our flood mapping achieved an overall accuracy of 99%. Our findings indicate that the flood event caused damage to almost 60% of the paddy rice fields. Based on the land suitability assessment, our results indicate that more land is suitable for cultivation during natural floods than is currently being used. We propose several recommendations as adaptation measures for stakeholders to improve livelihoods and mitigate flood disasters. This study highlights the importance of integrating multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for flood crop mapping using machine learning. Decision-makers will benefit from the flood crop mapping framework developed in this study in a number of spatial planning applications.

European Union crop map 2022: Earth observation’s 10-meter dive into Europe’s crop tapestry

To provide the information needed for a detailed monitoring of crop types across the European Union (EU), we present an advanced 10-metre resolution map for the EU and Ukraine with 19 crop types for 2022, updating the 2018 version. Using Earth Observation (EO) and in-situ data from Eurostat’s Land Use and Coverage Area Frame Survey (LUCAS) 2022, the methodology included 134,684 LUCAS Copernicus polygons, Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, land surface temperature and a digital elevation model. Based on this data, two classification layers were developed using a Random Forest machine learning approach: a primary map and a gap-filling map to address cloud-covered gaps. The combined maps, covering 27 EU countries, show an overall accuracy of 79.3% for seven major land cover classes and 70.6% for all 19 crop types. The trained model was used to derive the 2022 map for Ukraine, demonstrating its robustness even in regions without labelled samples for model training.

SSGAN: Cloud removal in satellite images using spatiospectral generative adversarial network

Satellite data’s reliability, uniformity, and global scanning capabilities have revolutionized agricultural monitoring and crop management. However, the presence of clouds in satellite images can obscure useful information, rendering them difficult to infer. Aiming at the problem of cloud cover, this study presents a SpatioSpectral Generative Adversarial Network (SSGAN) approach for effectively eliminating cloud cover from multispectral satellite images. It utilizes the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images as complementary information with the optical images from the Sentinel-2 satellite. The proposed model exploits feature extraction by sub-grouping the 13 channels of Sentinel-2 images based on their electromagnetic wavelength. Experimentally, we demonstrated that the proposed SSGAN model surpasses conventional and state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and can reconstruct regions obscured by clouds. The subgrouping optimized the utilization of sensor information and improved the performance metrics for reconstructed images. Compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach, the SSGAN model demonstrates higher performance, achieving a mPSNR of 32.771, mSSIM of 0.880, and correlation coefficient (CC) of 0.889. The SSGAN model was further evaluated under varying conditions, including scenarios without the inclusion of SAR data, where it achieved a mPSNR of 26.825, mSSIM of 0.726, and CC of 0.615. Adding SAR images into the model significantly enhanced its performance, resulting in a mPSNR of 29.932, mSSIM of 0.857, and CC of 0.735. These results indicate that higher mPSNR, mSSIM, and CC values correspond to better image reconstruction quality. Our method enhances the usability of satellite data for crop mapping, crop health monitoring, and crop yield prediction.

Remote Prediction of Soybean Yield Using UAV-Based Hyperspectral Imaging and Machine Learning Models

Early soybean yield estimation has become a fundamental tool for market policy and food security. Considering a heterogeneous crop, this study investigates the spatial and spectral variability in soybean canopy reflectance to achieve grain yield estimation. Besides allowing crop mapping, remote sensing data also provide spectral evidence that can be used as a priori knowledge to guide sample collection for prediction models. In this context, this study proposes a sampling design method that distributes sample plots based on the spatial and spectral variability in vegetation spectral indices observed in the field. Random forest (RF) and multiple linear regression (MLR) approaches were applied to a set of spectral bands and six vegetation indices to assess their contributions to the soybean yield estimates. Experiments were conducted with a hyperspectral sensor of 25 contiguous spectral bands, ranging from 500 to 900 nm, carried by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to collect images during the R5 soybean growth stage. The tests showed that spectral indices specially designed from some bands could be adopted instead of using multiple bands with MLR. However, the best result was obtained with RF using spectral bands and the height attribute extracted from the photogrammetric height model. In this case, Pearson’s correlation coefficient was 0.91. The difference between the grain yield productivity estimated with the RF model and the weight collected at harvest was 1.5%, indicating high accuracy for yield prediction.

Enhancing Pléiades-based crop mapping with multi-temporal and texture information

Accurate crop mapping using satellite imagery is crucial for improving the monitoring of agricultural landscapes. Very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery offers unique capabilities in this respect, allowing for even small fields to be discerned and image texture analysis to be performed. Additionally, satellite imagery has greater efficiency than unmanned aerial vehicles due to its extensive coverage. Moreover, the operation flexibility of VHR satellites means that timely image acquisition is possible several times during the growing season. This study investigates the potential of VHR Pléiades images and the random forest classifier for accurate crop mapping. Four images acquired on April 9th, May 12th, May 31st, and June 20th were used to test 16 classification scenarios, including single-date and multi-temporal combinations of spectral bands, texture features, and vegetation Indices (VIs). The classification using the spectral bands from all four images achieved the highest overall accuracy, 93.9% and 96.3% at field and pixel levels, respectively. The bitemporal classifications had lower accuracy. Nevertheless, the combination of the May 12th and June 20th spectral bands had 90% accuracy, which indicated that two images may be sufficient for reliable mapping if the periods with phenological differences between crops are considered. Adding texture features to the spectral bands significantly enhanced the accuracy (up to 8%) of single-date classifications, making it highly recommended when only one image is available. However, the impact of texture was more pronounced on the later dates. It showed the most marked benefit for vineyards and alfalfa, with minimal or no improvement observed for other classes like winter barley. An additional increase in overall accuracy was achieved in three of the four dates by supplementing the spectral and texture bands with VIs. This study highlights the importance of considering image acquisition dates and crop types when designing satellite-based crop mapping strategies for optimal accuracy.

Hierarchical classification for improving parcel-scale crop mapping using time-series Sentinel-1 data

Parcel-scale crop classification utilizing time-series satellite observations is of significant importance in precision agriculture. The prior knowledge that crop types can be organized in a hierarchical tree structure is beneficial for improving crop classification. Moreover, the crop hierarchy aligns with the coarse-to-fine cognitive process of geographic scenes. Based on the crop hierarchy, this study developed a general hierarchical classification framework for enhancing crop mapping using time-series Sentinel-1 data. Central to this method is a deep-learning-based hierarchical classification model that explores and makes use of crop hierarchical knowledge. First, preprocessed Sentinel-1 data were geometrically overlaid onto farmland parcel maps to derive parcel-scale time-series features. Second, we constructed a hierarchical crop type system for study areas based on the crop phenology of labeled crop-type samples. Third, we developed a deep-learning-based hierarchical classification model to identify crop types for each parcel, to generate final crop-type classification maps. The proposed approach was further discussed and verified through the implementation of parcel-scale time-series crop hierarchical classifications in a study area in France with farmland parcel maps and time-series Sentinel-1 data. The classification results, indicating significant improvements greater than 4.0% in overall accuracy and 5.0% in F1 score over comparative methods, demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in learning multi-scale time-series features for hierarchical crop classification utilizing Sentinel-1 data sequences.

A lightweight CNN-Transformer network for pixel-based crop mapping using time-series Sentinel-2 imagery

Deep learning approaches have provided state-of-the-art performance in crop mapping. Recently, several studies have combined the strengths of two dominant deep learning architectures, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers, to classify crops using remote sensing images. Despite their success, many of these models utilize patch-based methods that require extensive data labeling, as each sample contains multiple pixels with corresponding labels. This leads to higher costs in data preparation and processing. Moreover, previous methods rarely considered the impact of missing values caused by clouds and no-observations in remote sensing data. Therefore, this study proposes a lightweight multi-stage CNN-Transformer network (MCTNet) for pixel-based crop mapping using time-series Sentinel-2 imagery. MCTNet consists of several successive modules, each containing a CNN sub-module and a Transformer sub-module to extract important features from the images, respectively. An attention-based learnable positional encoding (ALPE) module is designed in the Transformer sub-module to capture the complex temporal relations in the time-series data with different missing rates. Arkansas and California in the U.S. are selected to evaluate the model. Experimental results show that the MCTNet has a lightweight advantage with the fewest parameters and memory usage while achieving the superior performance compared to eight advanced models. Specifically, MCTNet obtained an overall accuracy (OA) of 0.968, a kappa coefficient (Kappa) of 0.951, and a macro-averaged F1 score (F1) of 0.933 in Arkansas, and an OA of 0.852, a Kappa of 0.806, and an F1 score of 0.829 in California. The results highlight the importance of each component of the model, particularly the ALPE module, which enhanced the Kappa of MCTNet by 4.2% in Arkansas and improved the model’s robustness to missing values in remote sensing data. Additionally, visualization results demonstrated that the features extracted from CNN and Transformer sub-modules are complementary, explaining the effectiveness of the MCTNet.

A novel soybean mapping index within the global optimal time window

Efficient soybean mapping is critical for agricultural production and yield prediction. However, current sample-driven soybean mapping methods heavily rely on large representative sample datasets, limiting the interpretability of physical mechanisms. Besides, sample-free methods failed to exploit key features that differentiate soybean from other crops, especially Chlorophyll content. Misclassification errors persist and spatiotemporal generalization remains limited. Therefore, this study develops a novel Soybean Mapping Composite Index (SMCI) within a precise Global Optimal Time Window (GOTW). It integrates unique features of soybean Chlorophyll content, canopy water content, and canopy greenness by coupling three red-edge bands (RE2, RE3, and RE4), one near-infrared band, one shortwave infrared band, and two feature indices (Enhanced Vegetation Index and Green Chlorophyll Vegetation Index). The novel index was applied to soybean mapping at six sites in four major soybean producing countries (China, Argentina, Brazil, and the United States) from 2019 to 2021, using an optimal threshold of 3.25. Within the GOTW, the index responds better to spectral features and improves soybean separability. The average overall accuracy (OA: 91%) and average Kappa coefficient (Kappa: 0.83) for the novel index at all sites outperformed the traditional sample-driven Random Forest (RF) method (OA: 84%, Kappa: 0.70) and the existing sample-free index-based Greenness and Water Content Composite Index (GWCCI) (OA: 81%, Kappa: 0.64). Furthermore, interannual transfer experiments consistently showed high accuracy, demonstrating robust spatiotemporal transferability. The proposed SMCI index meets the need for a lightweight and stable soybean mapping tool and serves as a valuable reference for efficient global crop mapping.

A new transferable deep learning approach for crop mapping

ABSTRACT Accurate crop mapping provides important information for government decision-making and agricultural management. Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced the capabilities of remote sensing-based crop mapping. In this study, we developed a new deep learning approach, DSH, which comprises three modules, DeepLabV3+ (D), channel self-attention (S), and histogram matching (H). The DeepLabV3+ module learns the spatial distribution of crops in the spatial and spectral dimensions. The channel self-attention module was used to enhance the weights of the important features. The histogram-matching module addresses the domain gap between the training and testing images and enhances the transferability of the DSH. In addition, the input data of the DSH are monthly synthesized Sentinel-2 data, thus relaxing the data collection requirements. The performance of the DSH was evaluated and benchmarked against HRNetV2, DeepLabV3+, and random forest (RF) at eight sites in the U.S. China, and France with different farming structures, climate conditions, and landscape complexities. Temporal transfer revealed that the classification performance of DSH improved as the growth season progressed, peaked in the peak growth season (August), and then declined at each study site. The DSH model trained during the peak growth season demonstrated superior temporal transferability. Spatial transfer experiments demonstrated that transferring DSH to sites with similar planting structures achieved higher precision than full spatial transfers. Spatiotemporal transfer experiments conducted at eight sites over three years (2020–2022) demonstrated an average overall accuracy (OA) of 88.1% for DSH, highlighting the importance of similar planting structures for effective spatiotemporal transfer. DSH outperformed HRNetV2, DeepLabV3+, and RF in OA, producer’s accuracy, and user’s accuracy at all eight study sites. Notably, DSH exhibited comparable performance during both the peak and full growth seasons, with an average OA of 93.9%. The classification accuracy of test images after histogram matching remained stable from 2020 to 2022, whereas the accuracy of raw test images fluctuated annually. This indicates that histogram matching is effective in improving the transferability of DSH. Embedding the channel self-attention module into the position of the high-level features had a more significant impact on improving DSH’s performance than other configurations. Visualizing features from the channel self-attention and high-level layers revealed that integrating the channel self-attention module with DeepLabV3+‘s high-level features significantly improved crop mapping by enhancing relevant semantic information. Overall, DSH exhibits robust spatiotemporal generalizability and requires minimal input data, making it suitable for large-scale crop mapping.

Bibliometric Computation Mapping Analysis of Publication Machine and Deep Learning for Food Crops Mapping using VOSviewer

Machine learning and deep learning are currently widely used in various fields, including remote sensing for food security. However, there is no research that specifically examines the interests, developments, and trends of this research in the future. This study aims to examine the development of machine and deep learning research for mapping food crops through a bibliometric approach with computational mapping analysis using VOSviewer. Article data was obtained from the Google Scholar database using the publish or perish reference manager application. The title and abstract of the article were used to guide the search process by referring to the keyword “Machine and Deep Learning Mapping Food Crops”. 114 relevant articles were discovered. Google Scholar-indexed articles over the last ten years, from 2014 to 2023, were used as study material. The results show that machine research and deep learning for mapping food crops can be separated into three terms: machine learning, deep learning, and plant mapping. The term “Crop Mapping” has 57 links for a total of 199 links. The term "machine learning" has 41 links for a total of 79 links, and the term "deep learning" has 26 links for a total of 41 links. The results of the analysis of machine development and deep learning publications for mapping food crops in the last 10 years show a constant increase. The peak of the increase occurred in 2021 and 2022, namely 25 articles published per year, respectively. This means that this research topic is still relatively new in terms of interest and exploration, therefore there is still room further research. We examine numerous articles that have been published on machine and deep learning for crop mapping and their relation to the field studied with VOSviewer. This review can serve as a starting point for further research in different domains

Mapping of irrigated vineyard areas through the use of machine learning techniques and remote sensing

Effective and sustainable management of aquifers in regions with intensive groundwater use for irrigation requirements accurate mapping or irrigated areas to control water resource exploitation and plan rational water usage. This study proposes a cost-effective methodology based on satellite images to identify irrigated areas utilizing surface water and groundwater resources. The methodology integrates soil moisture estimations, environmental variables, and variables that affect to retention of water soil, that join a ground truth dataset, to estimate irrigated surface through a machine learning method during the irrigation period of 2021. Spectral data derived parameters and crop morphology, along with official data on agricultural parcels, were utilized to define vineyard irrigation areas at the plot scale within the Requena-Utiel aquifer in Eastern Spain. A machine learning classification technique was applied,yielding a remarkable precision of 91.8 % when compared to ground truth data.Discrepancies between the remote sensing-based irrigated area estimation and official data are highlighted. This study represents the most accurate plot-scale irrigation mapping of woody crops in the region to date.

A Segment Anything Model based weakly supervised learning method for crop mapping using Sentinel-2 time series images

Automatic crop mapping is essential for various agricultural applications. Although fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have shown effectiveness in crop mapping, they rely on labor-intensive pixel-level annotations. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods offer a solution by enabling pixel-level segmentation with less costly annotations, such as point, bounding box (bbox), and image-level annotations. However, these weak annotations often lack complete object information, leading to reduced accuracy. Moreover, there is limited exploration of WSSS methods in medium-resolution satellite imagery, such as Sentinel-2. Therefore, this study proposes SAMWS, a WSSS method based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for crop mapping using Sentinel-2 time series images. Leveraging SAM, our method can generate high-quality pseudo labels and accommodate various weak annotations without extensive adjustments. SAMWS comprises three stages: 1) finetuning SAM with adapters; 2) generating pseudo labels using weak annotations and finetuned SAM; and 3) training a segmentation network using pseudo labels for crop mapping. Experiments conducted on PASTIS and Munich datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. After SAM was finetuned with adapters, the F1-scores for parcel segmentation using point and bbox prompts increased by 75.0 % and 14.4 %, respectively, reaching 0.880 and 0.931. Additionally, our method achieves classification results closest to fully supervised learning when using point, bbox, and image-level annotations, with F1-scores of 0.810, 0.817, and 0.779, respectively. Our approach offers valuable insights into leveraging foundation models in the remote sensing domain and contains significant potential for crop monitoring. The relevant code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Nick0317Sun/SAMWS.

Digital mapping of soil quality and salt-affected soil indicators for sustainable agriculture in the Nile Delta region

The study addresses the challenge of sustainable land management, which is crucial for agricultural production and soil quality (SQ), in the face of land degradation that negatively impacts crop production and SQ. The goal of the current work is to assess SQ using digital soil mapping (DSM) in Kafr El-Sheikh province, Egypt, to develop a framework employing two methods for soil quality index (SQI) assessment: the total data set (SQI-TDS) and a selected minimum data set (SQI-MDS) to choose indicators, along with a weighted additive SQI (SQIw), and a Random Forest (RF) model to predict and map the SQI, as well as the salt-affected soil indicators (EC, pH, and ESP). This framework uses remote sensing data: time series of Sentinel-1 (S-1) and Sentinel-2 (S-2) greenest pixel composite. Additionally, we incorporated environmental covariates derived from S-1 and S-2 imagery to understand their influence on SQ, which in turn informs land management practices, land degradation assessment, and crop productivity. The findings reveal a clear negative impact of salinity and alkalinity on SQ. We demonstrate the importance of Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) and Sequential Feature Selection (SFS) techniques for improving the performance of the RF model used for prediction. Notably, the greenest pixel composite imagery proved promising for SQI assessment using DSM beneath vegetation cover, crop mapping, and land-use dynamics. The precise SQI obtained is essential for decision-makers to detect land degradation, develop sustainable agricultural management strategies, and assess their appropriateness for developing plans and strategies to increase agricultural productivity.

Area extraction and growth monitoring of sugarcane from multi-source remote sensing images under a polarimetric SAR data compensation based on buildings

ABSTRACT Aiming at the issue of low accuracy in crop mapping and growth monitoring caused by imprecise calibration of radar time-series data, this paper proposed a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) spatio-temporal error compensation method. By constructing a compensation reference image using the buildings with stable backscattering coefficients in the study area, the error correction of time-series SAR data was realized based on the compensation model. The compensated SAR data were used to establish the Sugarcane Growth Index (SGI) according to the growth curve of sugarcane. The sugarcane area was extracted after combining the compensated SGI and optical image, and the accuracy of F1 on sugarcane distribution extraction was 92.12%. There was an improvement of 4.11% compared with no compensation method. On this basis, the newly planted and ratoon sugarcane were further classified by the expectation maximization algorithm based on the compensated SAR image at the seedling stage. The newly planted sugarcane and the ratoon sugarcane could be accurately distinguished with area extraction accuracy of 82.06% and 80.59%, respectively. Moreover, the compensated SAR data of time series during the tillering to maturity stages were used to estimate the sugarcane height, yielding an R 2 value of 0.717 using a quadratic polynomial model. The Spatio-temporal error compensation method for distributed targets proposed in this study can reduce the loss of SAR data across various times and regions, and achieve accurate results of sugarcane distribution extraction and plant height estimation.

Comprehensive framework for interpretation of WaPOR water productivity

This study presents a comprehensive framework for analyzing water productivity products provided by the FAO Water Productivity Open-access portal (WaPOR), focusing on various crops cultivated in both rainfed and irrigated areas within a semi-arid basin in Iran. Two indices, namely Gross Water Productivity (GWP) and Net Water Productivity (NWP), were introduced to quantify water productivity across crop fields. However, these indices may mislead decision-makers, because they aggregate water productivity for all crops and exacerbate the challenges posed by water scarcity. Therefore, mapping crop types seems necessary to enhance the interpretation of these indices and develop a dimensionless index for comparing different crops. The results demonstrated a fundamental change when comparing dimensionless water productivity with GWP and NWP products. Surprisingly, some pixels initially exhibiting high water productivity ranked as low water-productive pixels based on the derived dimensionless index, and vice versa. Based on dimensionless indicators, rainfed crops, particularly rainfed cereals, ranked as the most water-productive crops. The areas with dimensionless values below 0.5 warrant heightened attention to curtail non-beneficial water consumption and elevate water productivity. This research emphasizes the significance of mapping cultivation types as supplementary layers to facilitate precise, data-driven decision-making and enable comparisons of crops based on dimensionless water productivity indices.

Crop mapping and quantitative evaluation of cultivated land use intensity in Shandong Province, 2018–2022

AbstractIndustrialization and urbanization have intensified land‐use pressures on agroecosystems. Monitoring cultivated land use intensity (CLUI) is crucial for implementing sustainable agriculture. However, current agroecosystem management in Shandong Province lacks high‐resolution CLUI information. To address this gap, this study measured and analyzed CLUI at a 1‐km scale in Shandong Province from 2018 to 2022, using self‐produced crop maps and the human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) framework. The spatial autocorrelation model was used to analyze the spatiotemporal pattern and aggregation characteristics of cultivated land use intensity. The influencing factors of CLUI were analyzed using the propensity score matching method, which helps reduce the interference of confounding factors. The results are as follows: (1) The wheat‐maize planting pattern in Shandong Province has remained relatively stable, with a notable trend toward intensified cultivation in the western region. (2) CLUI exhibited notable spatial and temporal heterogeneity, with low and medium values predominantly located in the western region. CLUI increased from 1.13 to 1.24, exceeding the global average of 0.84. (3) CLUI showed significant spatial aggregation characteristics. In 2018, 2020, and 2022, the western region was mainly characterized by high‐high and high‐low types. In 2019 and 2021, it was mainly characterized by the low‐low type, with less prevalence of low‐high type. The center of gravity of high‐high and low‐high types shifted southwest, whereas that of high‐low and low‐low types shifted northeast. (4) Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and plastic mulch exhibited significant positive correlations with CLUI, whereas temperature and precipitation showed significant negative correlations. Favorable natural conditions can mitigate human interference, leading to lower CLUI.

Exploring optimal features and image analysis methods for crop type classification from the perspective of crop landscape heterogeneity

Agricultural landscape structure (e.g., the shape of fields, crop diversity, and landscape heterogeneity) greatly influences the selection of methods for large-scale crop mapping using remote sensing data. However, in-depth assessments of its impacts on crop mapping remain infrequent in the existing literature. This study investigated the optimal crop identification features and image analysis methods including pixel- and object-based approaches on crop classification, through the integration of spectral and textural features across various quantitative agricultural landscapes. In the experiments, crop fields were initially delineated into four distinct landscapes using the K-means clustering algorithm based on analyzing 13 selected landscape metrics such as PLAND, LSI and SHDI. Both pixel- and object-based approaches were then employed to conduct crop classification was then conducted using 48 selected features including 9 band reflectance, 23 vegetation indices (VIs), and 16 textures) and two image analysis methods. Specifically, five classification schemes for the different combinations of feature datasets and image analysis methods were explored to assess the impacts of crop heterogeneity on crop classification. Results indicated the five landscape metrics (e.g., SPLIT, SHEI, Average distance, etc.) performed best in assessing crop heterogeneity. In general, spectral bands and VIs had a higher contribution in the compositional heterogeneity, while textural features and VIs played a more important role in the configurational heterogeneity. VIs in the object-based approach and texture features in the pixel-based approach can improved crop classification accuracy in configurational landscapes. The findings provide a theoretical basis on selecting optimal features and image analysis methods for crop classification in complex agricultural landscapes.