scholarly journals Potential of Sentinel-2 satellite images to monitor vine fields grown at a territorial scale

OENO One ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Devaux ◽  
Thomas Crestey ◽  
Corentin Leroux ◽  
Bruno Tisseyre

Aim: The aim of this short note is to provide first insights into the ability of Sentinel-2 images to monitor vine growth across a whole season. It focuses on verifying the practical temporal resolution that can be reached with Sentinel-2 images, the main stages of Mediterranean vineyard development as well as potential relevant agronomic information that can be seen on the temporal vegetation curves arising from Sentinel-2 images.Methods and results: The study was carried out in 2017 in a production vineyard located in southern France, 2 km from the Mediterranean seashore. Sentinel-2 images acquired during the whole vine growing cycle were considered, i.e. between the 3rd of March 2017 and the 10th of October 2017. The images were used to compute the classical normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Time series of NDVI values were analyzed on four blocks chosen for exhibiting different features, e.g. age, missing plants, weeding practices. The practical time lag between two usable images was closer to 16 days than to the 10 theoretical days (with only one satellite available at the date of the experiment), i.e. near 60% of the theoretical one. Results show that it might be possible to identify i) the main steps of vine development (e.g. budburst, growth, trimming, growth stop and senescence), ii) weed management and inter-row management practices, and iii) possible reasons for significant inter-block differences in vegetative expression (e.g. young vines that have recently been planted, low-productive blocks affected by many missing vines).Conclusions: Although this experiment was conducted at a time when Sentinel-2b was not fully operational, results showed that a sufficient number of usable images was available to monitor vine development. The availability of two Sentinel satellites (2a and 2b) in upcoming seasons should increase the number of usable images and the temporal resolution of the time series. This study also showed the limitations of the Sentinel-2 images’ resolution to provide within-block information in the case of small blocks or blocks with complex borders or both.Significance and impact of the study: This technical note demonstrated the potential of Sentinel-2 images to characterize vineyard blocks’ vigor and to monitor winegrowers’ practices at a territorial (regional) scale. The impact of management operations such as weeding and trimming, along with their incidence on canopy size, were observed on the NDVI time series. Some relevant parameters (slope, maximum values) may be derived from the NDVI time series, providing new insights into the monitoring of vineyards at a large scale. These results provided areas for further investigation, especially regarding the development of new indicators to characterize block-climate relationships.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 2195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blanka Vajsová ◽  
Dominique Fasbender ◽  
Csaba Wirnhardt ◽  
Slavko Lemajic ◽  
Wim Devos

The availability of large amounts of Sentinel-2 data has been a trigger for its increasing exploitation in various types of applications. It is, therefore, of importance to understand the limits above which these data still guarantee a meaningful outcome. This paper proposes a new method to quantify and specify restrictions of the Sentinel-2 imagery in the context of checks by monitoring, a newly introduced control approach within the European Common Agriculture Policy framework. The method consists of a comparison of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series constructed from data of different spatial resolution to estimate the performance and limits of the coarser one. Using similarity assessment of Sentinel-2 (10 m pixel size) and PlanetScope (3 m pixel size) NDVI time series, it was estimated that for 10% out of 867 fields less than 0.5 ha in size, Sentinel-2 data did not provide reliable evidence of the activity or state of the agriculture field over a given timeframe. Statistical analysis revealed that the number of clean or full pixels and the proportion of pixels lost after an application of a 5-m (1/2 pixel) negative buffer are the geospatial parameters of the field that have the highest influence on the ability of the Sentinel-2 data to qualify the field’s state in time. We specified the following limiting criteria: at least 8 full pixels inside a border and less than 60% of pixels lost. It was concluded that compliance with the criteria still assures a high level of extracted information reliability. Our research proved the promising potential, which was higher than anticipated, of Sentinel-2 data for the continuous state assessment of small fields. The method could be applied to other sensors and indicators.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Castellaneta ◽  
Angelo Rita ◽  
J. Julio Camarero ◽  
Michele Colangelo ◽  
Angelo Nolè ◽  
...  

<p>Several die-off episodes related to heat weaves and drought spells have evidenced the high vulnerability of Mediterranean oak forests. These events consisted in the loss in tree vitality and manifested as growths decline, elevated crown transparency (defoliation) and rising tree mortality rate. In this context, the changes in vegetation productivity and canopy greenness may represent valuable proxies to analyze how extreme climatic events trigger forest die-off. Such changes in vegetation status may be analyzed using remote-sensing data, specifically multi-temporal spectral information. For instance, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) measures changes in vegetation greenness and is a proxy of changes in leaf area index (LAI), forest aboveground biomass and productivity. In this study, we analyzed the temporal patterns of vegetation in three Mediterranean oak forests showing recent die-off in response to the 2017 severe summer drought. For this purpose, we used an open-source platform (Google Earth Engine) to extract collections of MODIS NDVI time-series from 2000 to 2019. The analysis of both NDVI trends and anomalies were used to infer differential patterns of vegetation phenology among sites comparing plots where most trees were declining and showed high defoliation (test) versus plots were most trees were considered healthy (ctrl) and showed low or no defoliation. Here we discuss: i) the likely offset in NDVI time-series between test- versus ctrl- sites; and ii) the impact of summer droughts  on NDVI.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: climate change, forest vulnerability, time series, remote sensing.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 2479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huiying Li ◽  
Mingming Jia ◽  
Rong Zhang ◽  
Yongxing Ren ◽  
Xin Wen

Information on mangrove species composition and distribution is key to studying functions of mangrove ecosystems and securing sustainable mangrove conservation. Even though remote sensing technology is developing rapidly currently, mapping mangrove forests at the species level based on freely accessible images is still a great challenge. This study built a Sentinel-2 normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series (from 2017-01-01 to 2018-12-31) to represent phenological trajectories of mangrove species and then demonstrated the feasibility of phenology-based mangrove species classification using the random forest algorithm in the Google Earth Engine platform. It was found that (i) in Zhangjiang estuary, the phenological trajectories (NDVI time series) of different mangrove species have great differences; (ii) the overall accuracy and Kappa confidence of the classification map is 84% and 0.84, respectively; and (iii) Months in late winter and early spring play critical roles in mangrove species mapping. This is the first study to use phonological signatures in discriminating mangrove species. The methodology presented can be used as a practical guideline for the mapping of mangrove or other vegetation species in other regions. However, future work should pay attention to various phenological trajectories of mangrove species in different locations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1965
Author(s):  
Daniela Vanella ◽  
Simona Consoli ◽  
Juan Miguel Ramírez-Cuesta ◽  
Matilde Tessitori

The technological advances of remote sensing (RS) have allowed its use in a number of fields of application including plant disease depiction. In this study, an RS approach based on an 18-year (i.e., 2001–2018) time-series analysis of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data, derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and processed with TIMESAT free software, was applied in Sicily (insular Italy). The RS approach was carried out in four orchards infected by Citrus tristeza virus (CTV) at different temporal stages and characterized by heterogeneous conditions (e.g., elevation, location, plant age). The temporal analysis allowed the identification of specific metrics of the NDVI time-series at the selected sites during the study period. The most reliable parameter which was able to identify the temporal evolution of CTV syndrome and the impact of operational management practices was the “Base value” (i.e., average NDVI during the growing seasons, which reached R2 values up to 0.88), showing good relationships with “Peak value”, “Small integrated value” and “Amplitude”, with R2 values of 0.63, 0.70 and 0.75, respectively. The approach herein developed is valid to be transferred to regional agencies involved in and/or in charge of the management of plant diseases, especially if it is integrated with ground-based early detection methods or high-resolution RS approaches, in the case of quarantine plant pathogens requiring control measures at large-scale level.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 2201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanimirova ◽  
Cai ◽  
Melaas ◽  
Gray ◽  
Eklundh ◽  
...  

Observations of vegetation phenology at regional-to-global scales provide important information regarding seasonal variation in the fluxes of energy, carbon, and water between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Numerous algorithms have been developed to estimate phenological transition dates using time series of remotely sensed spectral vegetation indices. A key challenge, however, is that different algorithms provide inconsistent results. This study provides a comprehensive comparison of start of season (SOS) and end of season (EOS) phenological transition dates estimated from 500 m MODIS data based on two widely used sources of such data: the TIMESAT program and the MODIS Global Land Cover Dynamics (MLCD) product. Specifically, we evaluate the impact of land cover class, criteria used to identify SOS and EOS, and fitting algorithm (local versus global) on the transition dates estimated from time series of MODIS enhanced vegetation index (EVI). Satellite-derived transition dates from each source are compared against each other and against SOS and EOS dates estimated from PhenoCams distributed across the Northeastern United States and Canada. Our results show that TIMESAT and MLCD SOS transition dates are generally highly correlated (r = 0.51-0.97), except in Central Canada where correlation coefficients are as low as 0.25. Relative to SOS, EOS comparison shows lower agreement and higher magnitude of deviations. SOS and EOS dates are impacted by noise arising from snow and cloud contamination, and there is low agreement among results from TIMESAT, the MLCD product, and PhenoCams in vegetation types with low seasonal EVI amplitude or with irregular EVI time series. In deciduous forests, SOS dates from the MLCD product and TIMESAT agree closely with SOS dates from PhenoCams, with correlations as high as 0.76. Overall, our results suggest that TIMESAT is well-suited for local-to-regional scale studies because of its ability to tune algorithm parameters, which makes it more flexible than the MLCD product. At large spatial scales, where local tuning is not feasible, the MLCD product provides a readily available data set based on a globally consistent approach that provides SOS and EOS dates that are comparable to results from TIMESAT.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 2143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuelle Vaudour ◽  
Cécile Gomez ◽  
Thomas Loiseau ◽  
Nicolas Baghdadi ◽  
Benjamin Loubet ◽  
...  

The spatial assessment of soil organic carbon (SOC) is a major environmental challenge, notably for evaluating soil carbon stocks. Recent works have shown the capability of Sentinel-2 optical data to predict SOC content over temperate agroecosystems characterized by annual crops, using a single acquisition date. Considering a Sentinel-2 time series, this work intends to analyze the impact of acquisition date, and related weather and soil surface conditions on the prediction performance of topsoil SOC content (plough layer). A Sentinel-2 time-series was gathered, comprised of the dates corresponding to both the maximum of bare soil coverage and minimum of cloud coverage. Cross-validated partial least squares regression (PLSR) models were constructed between soil reflectance image spectra, and SOC content analyzed from 329 top soil samples collected over the study area. Cross-validation R2 ranged from 0.005 to 0.58, root mean square error from 5.86 to 3.02 g·kg−1 and residual prediction deviation values from 1.0 to 1.5 (without unit), according to date. The main factors influencing these differences were soil roughness, in conjunction with soil moisture, and the cloud and cloud shadow cover of the entire tile. The best performing dates were spring dates characterized by both lowest soil surface roughness and moisture content. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values below 0.35 did not influence prediction performance. This consolidates the previous results obtained during single date acquisitions and offers wider perspectives for the further use of Sentinel-2 into multidate mosaics for digital soil mapping.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 1397
Author(s):  
Linglin Zeng ◽  
Brian D. Wardlow ◽  
Shun Hu ◽  
Xiang Zhang ◽  
Guoqing Zhou ◽  
...  

Vegetation indices (VIs) data derived from satellite imageries play a vital role in land surface vegetation and dynamic monitoring. Due to the excessive noises (e.g., cloud cover, atmospheric contamination) in daily VI data, temporal compositing methods are commonly used to produce composite data to minimize the negative influence of noise over a given compositing time interval. However, VI time series with high temporal resolution were preferred by many applications such as vegetation phenology and land change detections. This study presents a novel strategy named DAVIR-MUTCOP (DAily Vegetation Index Reconstruction based on MUlti-Temporal COmposite Products) method for normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time-series reconstruction with high temporal resolution. The core of the DAVIR-MUTCOP method is a combination of the advantages of both original daily and temporally composite products, and selecting more daily observations with high quality through the temporal variation of temporally corrected composite data. The DAVIR-MUTCOP method was applied to reconstruct high-quality NDVI time-series using MODIS multi-temporal products in two study areas in the continental United States (CONUS), i.e., three field experimental sites near Mead, Nebraska from 2001 to 2012 and forty-six AmeriFlux sites evenly distributed across CONUS from 2006 to 2010. In these two study areas, the DAVIR-MUTCOP method was also compared to several commonly used methods, i.e., the Harmonic Analysis of Time-Series (HANTS) method using original daily observations, Savitzky–Golay (SG) filtering using daily observations with cloud mask products as auxiliary data, and SG filtering using temporally corrected composite data. The results showed that the DAVIR-MUTCOP method significantly improved the temporal resolution of the reconstructed NDVI time series. It performed the best in reconstructing NDVI time-series across time and space (coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.93~0.94) between reconstructed NDVI and ground-observed LAI). DAVIR-MUTCOP method presented the highest robustness and accuracy with the change of the filtering parameter (R2 = 0.99~1.00, bias = 0.001, root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.020). Only MODIS data were used in this study; nevertheless, the DAVIR-MUTCOP method proposed a universal and potential way to reconstruct daily time series of other VIs or from other operational sensors, e.g., AVHRR and VIIRS.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petar Dimitrov ◽  
Qinghan Dong ◽  
Herman Eerens ◽  
Alexander Gikov ◽  
Lachezar Filchev ◽  
...  

This paper presents the results of a sub-pixel classification of crop types in Bulgaria from PROBA-V 100 m normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series. Two sub-pixel classification methods, artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR) were used where the output was a set of area fraction images (AFIs) at 100 m resolution with pixels containing estimated area fractions of each class. High-resolution maps of two test sites derived from Sentinel-2 classifications were used to obtain training data for the sub-pixel classifications. The estimated area fractions have a good correspondence with the true area fractions when aggregated to regions of 10 × 10 km2, especially when the SVR method was used. For the five dominant classes in the test sites the R2 obtained after the aggregation was 86% (winter cereals), 81% (sunflower), 92% (broad-leaved forest), 89% (maize), and 67% (grasslands) when the SVR method was used.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 2584
Author(s):  
Hassan Bazzi ◽  
Nicolas Baghdadi ◽  
Ghaith Amin ◽  
Ibrahim Fayad ◽  
Mehrez Zribi ◽  
...  

In this study, we present an operational methodology for mapping irrigated areas at plot scale, which overcomes the limitation of terrain data availability, using Sentinel-1 (S1) C-band SAR (synthetic-aperture radar) and Sentinel-2 (S2) optical time series. The method was performed over a study site located near Orléans city of north-central France for four years (2017 until 2020). First, training data of irrigated and non-irrigated plots were selected using predefined selection criteria to obtain sufficient samples of irrigated and non-irrigated plots each year. The training data selection criteria is based on two irrigation metrics; the first one is a SAR-based metric derived from the S1 time series and the second is an optical-based metric derived from the NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) time series of the S2 data. Using the newly developed irrigation event detection model (IEDM) applied for all S1 time series in VV (Vertical-Vertical) and VH (Vertical-Horizontal) polarizations, an irrigation weight metric was calculated for each plot. Using the NDVI time series, the maximum NDVI value achieved in the crop cycle was considered as a second selection metric. By fixing threshold values for both metrics, a dataset of irrigated and non-irrigated samples was constructed each year. Later, a random forest classifier (RF) was built for each year in order to map the summer agricultural plots into irrigated/non-irrigated. The irrigation classification model uses the S1 and NDVI time series calculated over the selected training plots. Finally, the proposed irrigation classifier was validated using real in situ data collected each year. The results show that, using the proposed classification procedure, the overall accuracy for the irrigation classification reaches 84.3%, 93.0%, 81.8%, and 72.8% for the years 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017, respectively. The comparison between our proposed classification approach and the RF classifier built directly from in situ data showed that our approach reaches an accuracy nearly similar to that obtained using in situ RF classifiers with a difference in overall accuracy not exceeding 6.2%. The analysis of the obtained classification accuracies of the proposed method with precipitation data revealed that years with higher rainfall amounts during the summer crop-growing season (irrigation period) had lower overall accuracy (72.8% for 2017) whereas years encountering a drier summer had very good accuracy (93.0% for 2019).


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