Classification of multitemporal Sentinel-2 data for field-level monitoring of rice cropping practices in Taiwan

Abstract Cadastral information of rice fields is important for monitoring cropping practices in Taiwan due to official initiatives. Remote sensing based rice monitoring has been a challenge for years because the size of rice fields is small, and crop mapping requires information of crop phenology, relating to spatiotemporal resolution of satellite data. This study aims to develop an approach for mapping rice-growing areas at field level using multi-temporal Sentinel-2 data in Taiwan. The data were processed for 2018, following four main steps: (1) construct time-series Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and Land Surface Water Index (LSWI), (2) noise filtering of the time-series data using wavelet transform, (3) rice crop classification using information of crop phenology, and (4) parcel-based accuracy assessment of the mapping results. The parcel-to-parcel comparisons between mapping results and ground reference data indicated satisfactory results. These findings were confirmed by close agreement between satellite-derived rice area and government’s statistics. Although some factors, including mixed-pixel issues and cloud-cover effects, lowered the mapping accuracies of townships along the coastline, this study has demonstrated the efficacy of using multitemporal Sentinel-2 data to create a reliable database of rice-growing areas over a large and heterogeneous region. Such a quantitative information was important for updating rice crop maps and monitoring cropping practices.