Towards automation of in-season crop type mapping using spatiotemporal crop information and remote sensing data

CONTEXT: Mapping crop types from satellite images is a promising application in agricultural systems. However, it is a challenge to automate in-season crop type mapping over a large area because of the insufficiency of ground truth and issues of scalability, reusability, and accessibility of the classification model. This study introduces a framework for automatic crop type mapping using spatiotemporal crop information and Sentinel-2 data based on Google Earth Engine (GEE). The main advantage of the framework is using the trusted pixels extracted from the historical Cropland Data Layer (CDL) to replace ground truth and label training samples in satellite images. OBJECTIVE: This paper will achieve three objectives: (1) assessing spatiotemporal crop information derived from the historical crop cover maps; (2) mapping crop cover, mainly crop fields without regular historical crop rotation patterns, from remote sensing data using supervised learning classification and validating mapping results; and (3) automating in-season crop mapping and exploring the scalability of the framework.METHODS: The proposed crop mapping workflow consists of four stages. The data preparation stage preprocesses CDL and Sentinel-2 data into the required structure. The spatiotemporal crop information sampling stage extracts trusted pixels from the historical CDL time series and labels Sentinel-2 data. Then a crop type classification model can be trained using the supervised learning classifier in the model training stage. In the mapping/validation stage, an in-season crop cover map over the full Sentinel-2 tile will be produced using the trained model and the classification performance will be validated using CDL or other ground truth data.RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We systematically perform a group of experiments for in-season mapping of five major crop types (corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, and soybeans-wheat double cropping) over the Mississippi Delta region. The result indicates that the crop cover map of the study area is expected to reach 80%-90% agreement with CDL within the growing season. To further facilitate the use of the framework, we also develop a GEE -enabled online prototype, In-season Crop Mapping Kit, and explore its scalability over agricultural fields in various ecoregions including California, Idaho, Kansas, and Illinois.SIGNIFICANCE: The mapping-without-ground-truth approach described in this paper can significantly reduce ground truthing process and save substantial resource needs and labor costs, which is applicable to the pro-duction of in-season CDL-like data for the entire United States. The findings and outputs will benefit the agri-culture community and other agricultural sectors ranging from government, academia, and companies.