High resolution crop intensity mapping using harmonized Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 data

An increase in crop intensity could improve crop yield but may also lead to a series of environmental problems, such as depletion of ground water and increased soil salinity. The generation of high resolution (30 m) crop intensity maps is an important method used to monitor these changes, but this is challenging because the temporal resolution of the 30-m image time series is low due to the long satellite revisit period and high cloud coverage. The recently launched Sentinel-2 satellite could provide optical images at 10-60 m resolution and thus improve the temporal resolution of the 30-m image time series. This study used harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) data to identify crop intensity. The sixth polynomial function was used to fit the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI) curves. Then, 15-day NDVI and EVI time series were then generated from the fitted curves and used to generate the extent of croplands. Lastly, the first derivative of the fitted VI curves were used to calculate the VI peaks; spurious peaks were removed using artificially defined thresholds and crop intensity was generated by counting the number of remaining VI peaks. The proposed methods were tested in four study regions, with results showing that 15-day time series generated from the fitted curves could accurately identify cropland extent. Overall accuracy of cropland identification was higher than 95%. In addition, both the harmonized NDVI and EVI time series identified crop intensity accurately as the overall accuracies, producer's accuracies and user's accuracies of non-cropland, single crop cycle and double crop cycle were higher than 85%. NDVI outperformed EVI as identifying double crop cycle fields more accurately.