Exploring the Drivers of Sentinel-2-Derived Crop Phenology: The Joint Role of Climate, Soil, and Land Use
1
Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, Research Centre for Agriculture and Environment (CREA-AA), 00184 Rome, Italy
2
Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, Research Centre for Engineering and Agro-Food Processing (CREA-IT), 00015 Monterotondo, Italy
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editors: Le Yu and Alejandro Rescia
Land 2021, 10(6), 656; https://doi.org/10.3390/land10060656
Received: 6 April 2021
/
Revised: 6 June 2021
/
Accepted: 14 June 2021
/
Published: 20 June 2021
(This article belongs to the Section Land Systems and Global Change)
The exploration of crop seasonality across a region offers a way to help understand the phenological spatial patterns of complex landscapes, like agricultural ones. Knowing the role of environmental factors in influencing crop phenology patterns and processes is a key aspect for understanding the impact of climate and land use changes on agricultural landscape dynamics. We identified pixels with similar phenological behavior (i.e., pheno-clusters) and compared them to the land cover map of the study area to assess the role of the land management component in controlling the phenological patterns identified. Results demonstrated that soil texture is the most important factor for permanent crops, while large amount of rainfall and high values of available water content are the main drivers in spring cultivations (i.e., irrigated crops). Scarce water availability (in terms of soil texture, low annual precipitation and high minimum temperature) represented the main driving factor for non-irrigated crops, whose phenology is characterized by summer drought and fall-winter productivity. Compared to vegetation maps that use only land cover from a single season or period, using seasonality of the NDVI time series to classify the agricultural landscape provides different and more ecologically relevant information about croplands.
View Full-Text
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
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
Bajocco, S.; Vanino, S.; Bascietto, M.; Napoli, R. Exploring the Drivers of Sentinel-2-Derived Crop Phenology: The Joint Role of Climate, Soil, and Land Use. Land 2021, 10, 656. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10060656
AMA Style
Bajocco S, Vanino S, Bascietto M, Napoli R. Exploring the Drivers of Sentinel-2-Derived Crop Phenology: The Joint Role of Climate, Soil, and Land Use. Land. 2021; 10(6):656. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10060656
Chicago/Turabian StyleBajocco, Sofia, Silvia Vanino, Marco Bascietto, and Rosario Napoli. 2021. "Exploring the Drivers of Sentinel-2-Derived Crop Phenology: The Joint Role of Climate, Soil, and Land Use" Land 10, no. 6: 656. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10060656
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
