Characterization of crop rotations in irrigation areas of the Ebro valley from temporal series of Landsat TM images

The present paper presents a method to characterize typical crop rotations from temporal series analysis of land use maps derived from supervised classifications of Landsat TM images. The analysis is based on spatial cross-tabulation of land use maps in raster format. As a case study, a temporal land use map series from 1993 to 2000 of the Flumen irrigation area (Huesca, Spain) was considered. The spatial cross-tabulation analysis between each pair of consecutive land use maps.. performed in Idrisi 32, yielded a two dimensional matrix that allowed the identification of the typical crop rotations in the study area. Those are rice - fallow land - rice, sunflower - winter cereals - alfalfa - corn, and others as winter cereal or sunflower - fallow land - corn or alfalfa. Rice appears as a typical crop in this area, in which it is usually associated to salt- and/or sodium-affected soils. Those typical rotations have been also spatially located and represented in a map following the crop changes from one year to another year that are registered in the cross-tabulation images. The method can be useful to identify tendencies in the temporal variation of crop rotations in agricultural areas, and to locate typical areas with salt- and/or sodium-affected soils by mapping rotations in which rice is the main crop.