Combining GEDI and Sentinel-2 for wall-to-wall mapping of tall and short crops

High resolution crop type maps are an important tool for improving food security, and remote sensing is increasingly used to create such maps in regions that possess ground truth labels for model training. However, these labels are absent in many regions, and models trained on optical satellite features often exhibit low performance when transferred across geographies. Here we explore the use of NASA's global ecosystem dynamics investigation (GEDI) spaceborne lidar instrument, combined with Sentinel-2 optical data, for crop type mapping. Using data from three major cropped regions (in China, France, and the United States) we first demonstrate that GEDI energy profiles can reliably distinguish maize, a crop typically above 2 m in height, from crops like rice and soybean that are shorter. We further show that these GEDI profiles provide much more invariant features across geographies compared to spectral and phenological features detected by passive optical sensors. GEDI is able to distinguish maize from other crops within each region with accuracies higher than 84%, and able to transfer across regions with accuracies higher than 82%, compared to 64% for transfer of optical features. Finally, we show that GEDI profiles can be used to generate training labels for models based on optical imagery from Sentinel-2, thereby enabling the creation of 10 m wall-to-wall maps of tall versus short crops in label-scarce regions. As maize is the second most widely-grown crop in the world and often the only tall crop grown within a landscape, we conclude that GEDI offers great promise for improving global crop type maps.

Automated summary

Using NASA's GEDI spaceborne lidar instrument combined with Sentinel-2 optical data for crop type mapping can reliably distinguish different crops with high accuracies across different geographic regions. GEDI profiles offer more stable and invariant features compared to optical features, showing great promise for improving global crop type maps.