Estimating Sub-Pixel Soybean Fraction from Time-Series MODIS Data Using an Optimized Geographically Weighted Regression Model
Qiong Hu 
1
Key Laboratory of Agricultural Remote Sensing, Ministry of Agriculture/Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China
2
Department of Earth and Environment, Boston University, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA
3
State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Jointly Sponsored by Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100101, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Remote Sens. 2018, 10(4), 491; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10040491
Received: 26 December 2017 / Revised: 15 March 2018 / Accepted: 19 March 2018 / Published: 21 March 2018
Soybean cultivation in China has significantly decreased due to the rising import of genetically modified soybeans from other countries. Understanding soybean’s extent and change information is of great value for national agricultural policy implications and global food security. Some previous studies have explored the quantitative relationships between crop area and spectral variables derived from remote sensing data. However, both those linear or non-linear relationships were expressed by global regression models, which ignored the spatial non-stationarity of crop spectral signature and may limit the prediction accuracy. This study presented a geographically weighted regression model (GWR) to estimate fractional soybean at 250 m spatial resolution in Heilongjiang Province, one of the most important food production regions in China, using time-series MODIS data and high-quality calibration information derived from Landsat data. A forward stepwise optimization strategy was embedded with the GWR model to select the optimal subset of independent variables for soybeans. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) of Julian day 233 to 257 when soybeans are filling seed was found to be the most important temporal period for sub-pixel soybean area estimation. Our MODIS-based soybean area compared well with Landsat-based results at pixel-level. Also, there was a good agreement between the MODIS-based result and census data at county level, with the coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.80 and the root mean square error (RMSE) was 340.21 km2. Additionally, F-test results showed GWR model had better model goodness-of-fit and higher prediction accuracy than the traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) model. These promising results suggest crop spectral variations both at temporal and spatial scales should be considered when exploring its relationship with pixel-level crop acreage. The optimized GWR model by combining an automated feature selection strategy has great potential for estimating sub-pixel crop area at regional scale based on remote sensing time-series data.
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Keywords:
geographically weighted regression; sub-pixel crop area; MODIS time series; forward stepwise selection; soybeans; Heilongjiang
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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
MDPI and ACS Style
Hu, Q.; Ma, Y.; Xu, B.; Song, Q.; Tang, H.; Wu, W. Estimating Sub-Pixel Soybean Fraction from Time-Series MODIS Data Using an Optimized Geographically Weighted Regression Model. Remote Sens. 2018, 10, 491.
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