Integration of Human Participatory Sensing and Archives of Remote Sensing Observations for Field Level Crop Phenology Estimation

Abstract

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The rise in global population has increased food and water demand thereby causing excessive pressure on existing resources. In developing countries with fragmented land holdings there exists constant pressure on available water and land resources. Obtaining field scale crop specific information is challenging task. Advent of open freely available multi-temporal remote sensing observations with improved radiometric resolution the possibilities for near real / real time applications has increased. In this study and an attempt has been made to establish operational model for field level crop growth monitoring using integrated approach of crowd sourcing and time series of remote sensing observations. The time series of Sentinel 2 (A and B) satellite has been used to estimate crop growth related components such as vegetation indices and crop growth stage and crop phenology. In initial stage high valued cereal crop Wheat has been selected. The field level information (i.e. 108 Wheat fields) collected using mobile based agro-advisory platform mKRISHI® has been used to extract time series of Sentinel 2 observations (44 scenes for year 2016 and 2018). The moving average has been used for filling gaps in the time series of vegetation indices. The BFAST and GreenBrown package in R were used for detecting breaks in vegetation index time series and estimating crop growth stages. Analysis shows that the estimated crop phenology parameters were in better agreement with the field observations. In future more crops from different agro-climatic conditions will be considered for providing field level crop management advisory.</p>