Geography

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    Wheat Yield Forecasting for Punjab Province from Vegetation Index Time Series and Historic Crop Statistics
    (MDPI, 2014-10-13) Dempewolf, Jan; Adusei, Bernard; Becker-Reshef, Inbal; Hansen, Matthew; Potapov, Peter; Khan, Ahmad; Barker, Brian
    Policy makers, government planners and agricultural market participants in Pakistan require accurate and timely information about wheat yield and production. Punjab Province is by far the most important wheat producing region in the country. The manual collection of field data and data processing for crop forecasting by the provincial government requires significant amounts of time before official reports can be released. Several studies have shown that wheat yield can be effectively forecast using satellite remote sensing data. In this study, we developed a methodology for estimating wheat yield and area for Punjab Province from freely available Landsat and MODIS satellite imagery approximately six weeks before harvest. Wheat yield was derived by regressing reported yield values against time series of four different peak-season MODIS-derived vegetation indices. We also tested deriving wheat area from the same MODIS time series using a regression-tree approach. Among the four evaluated indices, WDRVI provided more consistent and accurate yield forecasts compared to NDVI, EVI2 and saturation-adjusted normalized difference vegetation index (SANDVI). The lowest RMSE values at the district level for forecast versus reported yield were found when using six or more years of training data. Forecast yield for the 2007/2008 to 2012/2013 growing seasons were within 0.2% and 11.5% of final reported values. Absolute deviations of wheat area and production forecasts from reported values were slightly greater compared to using the previous year’s or the three- or six-year moving average values, implying that 250-m MODIS data does not provide sufficient spatial resolution for providing improved wheat area and production forecasts.
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    Winter Wheat Yield Assessment from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 Data: Incorporating Surface Reflectance, Through Phenological Fitting, into Regression Yield Models
    (MDPI, 2019-07-27) Skakun, Sergii; Vermote, Eric; Franch, Belen; Roger, Jean-Claude; Kussul, Nataliia; Ju, Junchang; Masek, Jeffrey
    A combination of Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 offers a high frequency of observations (3–5 days) at moderate spatial resolution (10–30 m), which is essential for crop yield studies. Existing methods traditionally apply vegetation indices (VIs) that incorporate surface reflectances (SRs) in two or more spectral bands into a single variable, and rarely address the incorporation of SRs into empirical regression models of crop yield. In this work, we address these issues by normalizing satellite data (both VIs and SRs) derived from NASA’s Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) product, through a phenological fitting. We apply a quadratic function to fit VIs or SRs against accumulated growing degree days (AGDDs), which affects the rate of crop development. The derived phenological metrics for VIs and SRs, namely peak, area under curve (AUC), and fitting coefficients from a quadratic function, were used to build empirical regression winter wheat models at a regional scale in Ukraine for three years, 2016–2018. The best results were achieved for the model with near infrared (NIR) and red spectral bands and derived AUC, constant, linear, and quadratic coefficients of the quadratic model. The best model yielded a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.201 t/ha (5.4%) and coefficient of determination R2 = 0.73 on cross-validation.
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    Using Multi-Resolution Satellite Data to Quantify Land Dynamics: Applications of PlanetScope Imagery for Cropland and Tree-Cover Loss Area Estimation
    (MDPI, 2021-06-04) Pickering, Jeffrey; Tyukavina, Alexandra; Khan, Ahmad; Potapov, Peter; Adusei, Bernard; Hansen, Matthew C.; Lima, André
    The Planet constellation of satellites represents a significant advance in the availability of high cadence, high spatial resolution imagery. When coupled with a targeted sampling strategy, these advances enhance land-cover and land-use monitoring capabilities. Here we present example regional and national-scale area-estimation methods as a demonstration of the integrated and efficient use of mapping and sampling using public medium-resolution (Landsat) and commercial high resolution (PlanetScope) imagery. Our proposed method is agnostic to the geographic region and type of land cover and change, which is demonstrated by applying the method across two very different geographies and thematic classes. Wheat extent is estimated in Punjab, Pakistan, for the 2018/2019 growing season, and tree-cover loss area is estimated over Peru for 2017 and 2018. We used a time series of PlanetScope imagery to classify a sample of 5 × 5 km blocks for each region and produce area estimates of 55,947 km2 (±9.0%) of wheat in Punjab and 5398 km2 (±9.1%) of tree-cover loss in Peru. We also demonstrate the use of regression estimation utilizing population information from Landsat-based maps to reduce standard errors of the sample-based estimates. Resulting regression estimates have SEs of 3.6% and 5.1% for Pakistan and Peru, respectively. The combination of daily global coverage and high spatial resolution of Planet imagery improves our ability to monitor crop phenology and capture ephemeral tree-cover loss and degradation dynamics, while Landsat-based maps provide wall-to-wall information to target the sample and increase precision of the estimates through the use of regression estimation.
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    A GENERALIZED APPROACH TO WHEAT YIELD FORECASTING USING EARTH OBSERVATIONS: DATA CONSIDERATIONS, APPLICATION, AND RELEVANCE.
    (2012) Becker-Reshef, Inbal; Justice, Christopher C; Vermote, Eric; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the demand for timely, comprehensive global agricultural intelligence. The issue of food security has rapidly risen to the top of government agendas around the world as the recent lack of food access led to unprecedented food prices, hunger, poverty, and civil conflict. Timely information on global crop production is indispensable for combating the growing stress on the world's crop production, for stabilizing food prices, developing effective agricultural policies, and for coordinating responses to regional food shortages. Earth Observations (EO) data offer a practical means for generating such information as they provide global, timely, cost-effective, and synoptic information on crop condition and distribution. Their utility for crop production forecasting has long been recognized and demonstrated across a wide range of scales and geographic regions. Nevertheless it is widely acknowledged that EO data could be better utilized within the operational monitoring systems and thus there is a critical need for research focused on developing practical robust methods for agricultural monitoring. Within this context this dissertation focused on advancing EO-based methods for crop yield forecasting and on demonstrating the potential relevance for adopting EO-based crop forecasts for providing timely reliable agricultural intelligence. This thesis made contributions to this field by developing and testing a robust EO-based method for wheat production forecasting at state to national scales using available and easily accessible data. The model was developed in Kansas (KS) using coarse resolution normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series data in conjunction with out-of-season wheat masks and was directly applied in Ukraine to assess its transferability. The model estimated yields within 7% in KS and 10% in Ukraine of final estimates 6 weeks prior to harvest. The relevance of adopting such methods to provide timely reliable information to crop commodity markets is demonstrated through a 2010 case study.