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Monitoring Watering Practices on European Rice Paddy Fields with Sentinel-1: Characterizing European Rice in Multitemporal SAR Sequences for Mapping and Traceability Purposes
Marzi, D.; Dell’Acqua, F. Mapping European Rice Paddy Fields Using Yearly Sequences of Spaceborne Radar Reflectivity: A Case Study in Italy. Earth2021, 2, 387-404.
Marzi, D.; Dell’Acqua, F. Mapping European Rice Paddy Fields Using Yearly Sequences of Spaceborne Radar Reflectivity: A Case Study in Italy. Earth 2021, 2, 387-404.
Marzi, D.; Dell’Acqua, F. Mapping European Rice Paddy Fields Using Yearly Sequences of Spaceborne Radar Reflectivity: A Case Study in Italy. Earth2021, 2, 387-404.
Marzi, D.; Dell’Acqua, F. Mapping European Rice Paddy Fields Using Yearly Sequences of Spaceborne Radar Reflectivity: A Case Study in Italy. Earth 2021, 2, 387-404.
Abstract
Whereas a vast literature exists on satellite-based mapping of rice paddy fields in Asia, where most of the global production takes place, little has been produced so far that focuses on the European context. Detection and mapping methods that work well in the Asian context will not offer the same performances in Europe, where different seasonal cycles, environmental contexts, and rice varieties make distinctive features dissimilar to the Asian case. In this context, water management is a key clue; watering practices are distinctive for rice with respect to other crops, and within rice there exist diverse cultivation practices including organic and non-organic approaches. In this paper, we focus on satellite-observed water management to identify rice paddy fields cultivated with a traditional agricultural approach. Building on established research results, and guided by the output of experiments on real-world cases, a new method for analysing time series of Sentinel-1 data has been developed, which can identify traditional rice fields with a high degree of reliability. This work is a part of a broader initiative to build space-based tools for collecting additional pieces of evidence to support food chain traceability; the whole system will consider various parameters, whose analysis procedures are still at their early stages of development.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
