A 30-m resolution distribution map of maize for China based on Landsat and Sentinel images

As the second largest producer of maize, China contributes 23% of global maize production and plays an important role in guaranteeing maize markets stability. In spite of its importance, there is no 30 m spatial resolution distribution map of maize for all of China. This study used a time-weighted dynamic time warping method to identify planting areas of maize by comparing the similarity of time series of a satellite-based vegetation index at each pixel with a standard time series derived from known maize fields and mapped maize distribution from 2016 to 2020 over 22 provinces accounting for more than 99% of the maize planting area in China. Based on 18800 field-surveyed pixels at 30-meter spatial resolution, the distribution map yields 76.15% and 81.59% of producer’s and user’s accuracies averaged over the entire investigated provinces, respectively. Municipality- and county-level census data also show a good performance in reproducing the spatial distribution of maize. This study provides an approach to mapping maize over large areas based on a small volume of field survey data.

classification system:

1: maize

0: non-maize

Ruoque Shen, Jie Dong, Wenping Yuan, Wei Han, Tao Ye, Wenzhi Zhao, "A 30 m Resolution Distribution Map of Maize for China Based on Landsat and Sentinel Images", Journal of Remote Sensing, vol. 2022, Article ID 9846712, 12 pages, 2022. https://doi.org/10.34133/2022/9846712