Estimating Crop Sowing and Harvesting Dates Using Satellite Vegetation Index: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

In the last decades, several methodologies for estimating crop phenology based on remote sensing data have been developed and used to create different algorithms. Although many studies have been conducted to evaluate the different methodologies, a comprehensive understanding of the potential of the different current algorithms to detect changes in the growing season is still lacking, especially in large regions and with more than one crop per season. Therefore, this work aimed to evaluate different phenological metrics extraction methodologies. Using data from over 1500 fields distributed across Brazil’s central area, six algorithms, including CropPhenology, Digital Earth Australia tools package (DEA), greenbrown, phenex, phenofit, and TIMESAT, to extract soybean crop phenology were applied. To understand how robust the algorithms are to different input sources, the NDVI and EVI2 time series derived from MODIS products (MOD13Q1 and MOD09Q1) and from Sentinel-2 satellites were used to estimate the sowing date (SD) and harvest date (HD) in each field. The algorithms produced significantly different phenological date estimates, with Spearman’s R ranging between 0.26 and 0.82 when comparing sowing and harvesting dates. The best estimates were obtained using TIMESAT and phenex for SD and HD, respectively, with R greater than 0.7 and RMSE of 16–17 days. The DEA tools and greenbrown packages showed higher sensitivity when using different data sources. Double cropping is an added challenge, with no method adequately identifying it.