Ukraine is one of the most developed agricultural countries in the world. For many applications, it is extremely important to provide reliable crop maps taking into account diversity of cropping systems used in Ukraine. The use of optical imagery only is limited due to cloud cover, and previous studies showed particular difficulties in discriminating summer crops in Ukraine such as maize, soybeans, sunflower, and sugar beet. This paper focuses on exploring feasibility and assessing efficiency of using multitemporal satellite synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) acquired in C-band and optical images for crop classification in Ukraine. Both optical (Landsat-8/OLI) and SAR (Radarsat-2) images are used to assess the impact of adding backscattering intensity from SAR images for classification purposes. SAR intensity information is very important due to availability of Sentinel-1 imagery over Ukraine starting March 2015. Different combinations of optical and SAR images, as well as SAR modes and polarizations, are assessed for better discrimination of crops. A committee of neural networks, in particular multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), is used to improve classification accuracy compared to several standard classifiers. It is found that using backscatter coefficients from SAR images alone provides the same performance for winter crops (wheat and rapeseed) as surface reflectance from optical images. Considering the summer crops, the major impact of adding backscatter intensity information from SAR images is in better separation of sunflower, soybeans, and maize.Index Terms-Crop classification, ensemble, joint experiment for crop assessment and monitoring (JECAM), Landsat-8, neural networks (NNs), Radarsat-2, Ukraine.

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A combination of Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 offers a high frequency of observations (3-5 days) at moderate spatial resolution (10-30 m), which is essential for crop yield studies. Existing methods traditionally apply vegetation indices (VIs) that incorporate surface reflectances (SRs) in two or more spectral bands into a single variable, and rarely address the incorporation of SRs into empirical regression models of crop yield. In this work, we address these issues by normalizing satellite data (both VIs and SRs) derived from NASA's Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) product, through a phenological fitting. We apply a quadratic function to fit VIs or SRs against accumulated growing degree days (AGDDs), which affects the rate of crop development. The derived phenological metrics for VIs and SRs, namely peak, area under curve (AUC), and fitting coefficients from a quadratic function, were used to build empirical regression winter wheat models at a regional scale in Ukraine for three years, 2016-2018. The best results were achieved for the model with near infrared (NIR) and red spectral bands and derived AUC, constant, linear, and quadratic coefficients of the quadratic model. The best model yielded a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.201 t/ha (5.4%) and coefficient of determination R 2 = 0.73 on cross-validation.is that methods for generating products from coarse spatial resolution sensors can be ported to moderate (Landsat 8/OLI, Sentinel-2/MSI) or high (Planet/PlanetScope) spatial resolution sensors. However, the practice shows that such a transition is not always straightforward due to larger data gaps because of clouds and uneven coverage, sensor characteristics, and increased spatial resolution (at least at the order of 100, when going from 250 to 30 m).Consider, for example, a crop yield assessment/forecasting application [4]. The hypothesis is that satellite-based features, such as vegetation indices (VIs) or biophysical parameters derived at a single date or accumulated over some time period, can be correlated to crop yields [5,6]. Since the reference data on crop yields are mainly available at the regional scale, the corresponding empirical models are built by averaging satellite-based features over those regions and correlating these derived variables with crop yields [7][8][9]. It is assumed that there is a homogeneity within the region in terms of crops grown and agricultural practices applied and, therefore, the averaging should be performed for satellite data acquired at the same (or approximately the same) stages of crop growth, meaning that the data are normalized. This is usually the case for coarse spatial resolution remote sensing sensors, which enable a higher likelihood of obtaining a high temporal frequency of cloud-free data over the Earth's surface [10,11]. This is also evidenced by multiple successful applications of coarse spatial resolution satellite data to crop yield assessment and forecasting [5,[7][8][9][12][13][14][15].However, this is not the case for moderate spatial resolution sat...

This paper focuses on drought risk assessment using satellite data. Methods of the extreme value theory (EVT) are applied for a time series of vegetation health index (VHI) derived from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites in order to provide drought hazard mapping. A Poisson-GP (generalized Pareto) model is applied for modelling VHI extreme values. The model allows estimation and mapping of return periods of different categories of droughts. An approach to economical risk assessment due to droughts is presented that relies on the following components: damage function assessment, crop yield assessment, and crop area estimation. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it allows quantification of drought hazard through the drought return period, damages, and ultimately drought risk using satellite data. The derived drought hazard map is integrated with high-resolution crop map to provide final estimates of risk. The proposed approach is implemented for quantitative assessment of drought risk for the Kyiv region in Ukraine. The derived map shows that risk is distributed non-uniformly over the region, thus allowing identification of areas with higher risk. Such a map would be of great benefit to both local authorities to take directed actions to reduce the risk and insurance companies operating in agriculture sector.