@article{NguyenKerstenSenmaoetal.2015, author = {Nguyen, Duy Ba and Kersten, Clauss and Senmao, Cao and Vahid, Naeimi and Kuenzer, Claudia and Wagner, Wolfgang}, title = {Mapping Rice Seasonality in the Mekong Delta with Multi-Year Envisat ASAR WSM Data}, series = {Remote Sensing}, volume = {7}, journal = {Remote Sensing}, number = {12}, doi = {10.3390/rs71215808}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-137554}, pages = {15868-15893}, year = {2015}, abstract = {Rice is the most important food crop in Asia, and the timely mapping and monitoring of paddy rice fields subsequently emerged as an important task in the context of food security and modelling of greenhouse gas emissions. Rice growth has a distinct influence on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) backscatter images, and time-series analysis of C-band images has been successfully employed to map rice fields. The poor data availability on regional scales is a major drawback of this method. We devised an approach to classify paddy rice with the use of all available Envisat ASAR WSM (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar Wide Swath Mode) data for our study area, the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. We used regression-based incidence angle normalization and temporal averaging to combine acquisitions from multiple tracks and years. A crop phenology-based classifier has been applied to this time series to detect single-, double- and triple-cropped rice areas (one to three harvests per year), as well as dates and lengths of growing seasons. Our classification has an overall accuracy of 85.3\% and a kappa coefficient of 0.74 compared to a reference dataset and correlates highly with official rice area statistics at the provincial level (R-2 of 0.98). SAR-based time-series analysis allows accurate mapping and monitoring of rice areas even under adverse atmospheric conditions.}, language = {en} } @article{RichardAbdelRahmanSubramanianetal.2017, author = {Richard, Kyalo and Abdel-Rahman, Elfatih M. and Subramanian, Sevgan and Nyasani, Johnson O. and Thiel, Michael and Jozani, Hosein and Borgemeister, Christian and Landmann, Tobias}, title = {Maize cropping systems mapping using RapidEye observations in agro-ecological landscapes in Kenya}, series = {Sensors}, volume = {17}, journal = {Sensors}, number = {11}, doi = {10.3390/s17112537}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-173285}, year = {2017}, abstract = {Cropping systems information on explicit scales is an important but rarely available variable in many crops modeling routines and of utmost importance for understanding pests and disease propagation mechanisms in agro-ecological landscapes. In this study, high spatial and temporal resolution RapidEye bio-temporal data were utilized within a novel 2-step hierarchical random forest (RF) classification approach to map areas of mono- and mixed maize cropping systems. A small-scale maize farming site in Machakos County, Kenya was used as a study site. Within the study site, field data was collected during the satellite acquisition period on general land use/land cover (LULC) and the two cropping systems. Firstly, non-cropland areas were masked out from other land use/land cover using the LULC mapping result. Subsequently an optimized RF model was applied to the cropland layer to map the two cropping systems (2nd classification step). An overall accuracy of 93\% was attained for the LULC classification, while the class accuracies (PA: producer's accuracy and UA: user's accuracy) for the two cropping systems were consistently above 85\%. We concluded that explicit mapping of different cropping systems is feasible in complex and highly fragmented agro-ecological landscapes if high resolution and multi-temporal satellite data such as 5 m RapidEye data is employed. Further research is needed on the feasibility of using freely available 10-20 m Sentinel-2 data for wide-area assessment of cropping systems as an important variable in numerous crop productivity models.}, language = {en} }