A logistic-based method for rice monitoring from multi-temporal MODIS-landsat fusion data

Information on rice cropping activities and growing areas is critical for crop management. This study developed a logistic-based method to monitor rice sowing and harvesting activities and, accordingly, to map rice growing areas from the MODIS–Landsat fusion data in An Giang Province, Vietnam. The EVI2 data derived from the fusion data compared with that of Landsat data indicated a close correlation (R2 = 0.93). The comparisons between the estimated sowing and harvesting dates and the field survey data revealed the RMSE values of around 8 and 5 days for the winter–spring crop and 9 and 12 days for the summer–autumn crop, respectively. The rice mapping results compared with the ground reference data indicated an overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of 93.2% and 0.86 for the winter–spring crop, and 91.7% and 0.83 for the summer–autumn crop, respectively. These results were reaffirmed by the government’s rice areas statistics, with the relative error in area values smaller than 3.3%.