Mapping rapeseed planting areas using an automatic phenology- and pixel-based algorithm (APPA) in Google Earth Engine

Abstract

The timely and rapid mapping of rapeseed planting areas is desirable for national food security. Most current rapeseed mapping methods depend strongly on images with good observations obtained during the flowering stages. Although vegetation indices have been proposed to identify the rapeseed flowering stage in some areas, automatically mapping rapeseed planting areas in large regions is still challenging. We developed an automatic phenology- and pixel-based algorithm (APPA) by integrating Landsat 8 and Sentinel-1 satellite data. We found that the Normalized Rapeseed Flowering Index shows unique spectral characteristics during the flowering and post-flowering periods, which distinguish rapeseed parcels from other land-use types (urban, water, forest, grass, maize, wheat, barley, and soybean). To verify the robustness of APPA, we applied APPA to seven areas in five rapeseed-producing countries with flowering images unavailable. The rapeseed maps by APPA showed consistently high accuracies with producer accuracies of (0.87–0.93 and F-scores of 0.92–0.95 based on 4503 verification samples. They showed high spatial consistency at the pixel level with the land cover Scientific Expertise Centres (SEC) map in France, Crop Map of England in United Kingdom, national-scale crop- and land-cover map of Germany, and Annual Crop Inventory in Canada at the pixel level. We propose APPA as a highly promising method for automatically and efficiently mapping rapeseed areas.

Keywords

• Automatic mapping
• Spectral indices
• Polarization
• Phenology
• Rapeseed