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Crop Yield Prediction Using Remote Sensing Techniques

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Remote Sensing in Agriculture and Vegetation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 26 February 2026 | Viewed by 781

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Remote Sensing, University of Wuerzburg, 97074 Würzburg, Germany
Interests: agricultural remote sensing; monitoring the harvest yield; sustainable agriculture; precision agriculture

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Global agricultural systems are increasingly being challenged by climate variability, land-use change, and the growing demand for food security. Accurate, timely, and scalable methods for crop yield prediction are essential to support precision agriculture, optimize resource use, and guide policy decisions. In this context, remote sensing has emerged as a powerful tool for monitoring crop dynamics and estimating yield across spatial and temporal scales. With advances in satellite, UAV, and sensor technologies—as well as machine learning and data fusion approaches—yield modeling has entered a new era of precision and operational feasibility.

This Special Issue aims to explore cutting-edge research and innovative applications of remote sensing techniques for crop yield prediction. It aligns with the journal’s scope by promoting interdisciplinary studies that integrate Earth observation, agronomy, environmental science, and computational methods to address agricultural challenges. Contributions are encouraged from both methodological and applied perspectives, covering a wide range of crops and agroecological regions.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Yield estimation using multispectral, hyperspectral, radar, or thermal imagery;
  • Machine learning and hybrid modeling approaches (e.g., LUE, RF, CNNs);
  • Data fusion (e.g., MODIS–Landsat, Sentinel–UAV);
  • Phenological monitoring and crop growth modeling;
  • In-season yield forecasting and stress detection;
  • Integration of environmental, soil, and climate data;
  • Operational systems and platforms for yield prediction;
  • Ground truthing, uncertainty, and model validation.

Original research articles, reviews, and case studies are welcome.

Dr. Maninder Singh Dhillon
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • crop yield prediction
  • remote sensing
  • NDVI and vegetation indices
  • machine learning
  • light use efficiency (LUE)
  • data fusion (e.g., MODIS–Landsat)
  • phenology and crop growth models
  • climate and environmental drivers
  • UAV and satellite imagery
  • precision agriculture

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

23 pages, 3843 KB  
Article
Monitoring Maize Yield Variability over Space and Time with Unsupervised Satellite Imagery Features
by Cullen Molitor, Juliet Cohen, Grace Lewin, Steven Cognac, Protensia Hadunka, Jonathan Proctor and Tamma Carleton
Remote Sens. 2025, 17(21), 3641; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs17213641 - 4 Nov 2025
Viewed by 399
Abstract
Recent innovations in task-agnostic imagery featurization have lowered the computational costs of using machine learning to predict ground conditions from satellite imagery. These methods hold particular promise for the development of imagery-based monitoring systems in low-income regions, where data and computational resources can [...] Read more.
Recent innovations in task-agnostic imagery featurization have lowered the computational costs of using machine learning to predict ground conditions from satellite imagery. These methods hold particular promise for the development of imagery-based monitoring systems in low-income regions, where data and computational resources can be limited. However, these relatively simple prediction pipelines have not been evaluated in developing-country contexts over time, limiting our understanding of their performance in practice. Here, we compute task-agnostic random convolutional features from satellite imagery and use linear ridge regression models to predict maize yields over space and time in Zambia, a country prone to severe droughts and crop failure. Leveraging Landsat and Sentinel 2 satellite constellations, in combination with district-level yield data, our model explains 83% of the out-of-sample maize yield variation from 2016 to 2021, slightly outperforming a model trained on Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) features, a common remote sensing approach used by practitioners to monitor crop health. Our approach maintains an R2 score of 0.74 when predicting temporal variation alone, while the performance of the NDVI-based approach drops to an R2 of 0.39. Our findings imply that this task-agnostic featurization can be used to predict spatial and temporal variation in agricultural outcomes, even in contexts with limited ground truth data. More broadly, these results point to imagery-based monitoring as a promising tool for assisting agricultural planning and food security, even in contexts where computationally expensive methodologies remain out of reach. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Crop Yield Prediction Using Remote Sensing Techniques)
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