Sentinel-1 SAR Time Series-Based Assessment of the Impact of Severe Salinity Intrusion Events on Spatiotemporal Changes in Distribution of Rice Planting Areas in Coastal Provinces of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

Abstract

Food security has become a key global issue due to rapid population growth, extensive conversion of arable lands, and declining overall productivity in some areas because of the effects of floods, water shortage, salinity intrusion, and plant diseases. In this study, we analyzed the relationship between the pattern of salinity intrusion and the spatiotemporal distribution of rice cultivation in the winter–spring crops of 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2020 in coastal provinces of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. Sentinel-1 (S-1) data were used to extract the spatial distribution information of six rice growth stages based on a rice age algorithm. The classification accuracy of rice crop growth stages was found to have an overall accuracy of 85% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.80 (n = 373). For evaluating salinity intrusion effects, salinity isolines (4 g/L) were used to determine the percentage of rice areas affected. Results show that in the years observed to have severe salinity intrusion such as 2016 and 2020, a strong shift in planting calendar was identified to avoid salinity intrusion, with some areas being sown or transplanted 10–30 days earlier than normal planting. In addition, the lack of irrigation water and salinity intrusion limits rice cultivation in the dry season of coastal areas. Further analysis from the S-1 data confirms that the spatiotemporal distribution of rice cultivation is related to the change in government policy/recommendation affected by salinity intrusion. These findings demonstrate the potential and feasibility of using S-1 data to develop an operational rice crop adaptation framework on the delta scale.

Keywords

• rice monitoring
• mekong delta
• spatiotemporal distribution
• drought and salinity
• synthetic aperture radar