Satellite Constellation Reveals Crop Growth Patterns and Improves Mapping Accuracy of Cropping Practices for Subtropical Small-Scale Fields in Japan

Mapping of agricultural crop types and practices is important for setting up agricultural production plans and environmental conservation measures. Sugarcane is a major tropical and subtropical crop; in general, it is grown in small fields with large spatio-temporal variations due to various crop management practices, and satellite observations of sugarcane cultivation areas are often obscured by clouds. Surface information with high spatio-temporal resolution obtained through the use of emerging satellite constellation technology can be used to track crop growth patterns with high resolution. In this study, we used Planet Dove imagery to reveal crop growth patterns and to map crop types and practices on subtropical Kumejima Island, Japan (lat. 26°21′01.1″ N, long. 126°46′16.0″ E). We eliminated misregistration between the red-green-blue (RGB) and near-infrared band imagery, and generated a time series of seven vegetation indices to track crop growth patterns. Using the Random Forest algorithm, we classified eight crop types and practices in the sugarcane. All the vegetation indices tested showed high classification accuracy, and the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) had an overall accuracy of 0.93 and Kappa of 0.92 range of accuracy for different crop types and practices in the study area. The results for the user’s and producer’s accuracy of each class were good. Analysis of the importance of variables indicated that five image sets are most important for achieving high classification accuracy: Two image sets of the spring and summer sugarcane plantings in each year of a two-year observation period, and one just before harvesting in the second year. We conclude that high-temporal-resolution time series images obtained by a satellite constellation are very effective in small-scale agricultural mapping with large spatio-temporal variations.