Overview of Crop Identification and Condition Mapping using Polarimetric SAR data

The Potential of RADARSAT-2 for Crop Mapping and Assessing Crop Condition

Source: R.J. Brown, and J. Ellis,
Presented at the Second International Conference on Geospatial Information in Agriculture & Forestry,
Lake Buena Vista, Florida, 10-12 January, 2000.

For full paper (PDF file size: 1.02 MB)

Crop Idle
Crop acreage and crop type information is required for much of the agricultural sector. Results using multi-temporal RADARSAT-1 imagery have demonstrated that C-HH backscatter can detect differences in crop type, crop growth stage and crop indicators like crop height, biomass and leaf area index.

The preliminary results described in this paper, have emphasized the advantage of multi-polarized data sets. It is anticipated that a single multi-polarized image will supply much more information on vegetation type and condition than a single C- HH image. The following table represents the preliminary results of this work.

Remote sensing - both optical and radar have demonstrated success for mapping crop residue levels. The following table suggests the preferred SAR configurations (C-band) for maximizing information content. The paper examined corn and barley crop residues at the Experimental Farm in Ottawa using Scatterometer data.