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Early and accurate prediction of grain yield is of great significance for ensuring food security and formulating food policy. The exploration of key growth phases and features is beneficial to improving the efficiency and accuracy of yield prediction. In this study, a hybrid approach using the WOFOST model and deep learning was developed to forecast corn yield, which analysed yield prediction potential at different growth phases and features. The World Food Studies (WOFOST) model was used to build a comprehensive simulated dataset by inputting meteorological, soil, crop and management data. Different feature combinations at various growth phases were designed to forecast yield using machine learning and deep learning methods. The results show that the key features of corn's vegetative growth stage and reproductive growth stage were growth state features and water-related features, respectively. With the continuous advancement of the crop growth stage, the ability to predict yield continued to improve. Especially after entering the reproductive growth stage, corn kernels begin to form, and the yield prediction performance is significantly improved. The performance of the optimal yield prediction model in flowering (R2 = 0.53, RMSE = 554.84 kg/ha, MRE = 8.27%), in milk maturity (R2 = 0.89, RMSE = 268.76 kg/ha, MRE = 4.01%), and in maturity (R2 = 0.98, RMSE = 102.65 kg/ha, MRE = 1.53%) were given. Thus, our method improves the accuracy of yield prediction, and provides reliable analysis results for predicting yield at various growth phases, which is helpful for farmers and governments in agricultural decision making. This can also be applied to yield prediction for other crops, which is of great value to guide agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an important parameter for earth surface process simulations, climate modeling, and global change studies. Currently, several FVC products have been generated from coarse resolution (~1 km) remote sensing data, and have been widely used. However, coarse resolution FVC products are not appropriate for precise land surface monitoring at regional scales, and finer spatial resolution FVC products are needed. Time-series coarse spatial resolution FVC products at high temporal resolutions contain vegetation growth information. Incorporating such information into the finer spatial resolution FVC estimation may improve the accuracy of FVC estimation. Therefore, a method for estimating finer spatial resolution FVC from coarse resolution FVC products and finer spatial resolution satellite reflectance data is proposed in this paper. This method relies on the coupled PROSAIL radiative transfer model and a statistical crop growth model built from the coarse resolution FVC product. The performance of the proposed method is investigated using the time-series Global LAnd Surface Satellite FVC product and Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus reflectance data in a cropland area of the Heihe River Basin. The direct validation of the FVC estimated using the proposed method with the ground measured FVC data ( R^\mathrm \mathbf 2 = 0.6942 , RMSE =0.0884), compared with the widely used dimidiate pixel model ( R^\mathrm \mathbf 2 = 0.7034 , RMSE = 0.1575), shows that the proposed method is feasible for estimating finer spatial resolution FVC with satisfactory accuracy, and it has the potential to be applied at a large scale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Opium is a narcotic obtained from opium poppy and is the raw material of heroin for the illegal drug trade. Monitoring the illegal concentrated cultivation of opium poppy in major regions is critical for the understanding by governments and international communities of the scale of illegal drug trade. This paper investigates whether opium poppy can be discriminated from its coexisting plants using analytical-spectral-device field spectrometer data in the visible to short-wave infrared spectral range. Canopy spectral measurements were conducted during three different growth periods of opium poppy. A synthetic method with three analysis levels was applied to discriminate opium poppy from other species and to select optimal bands for opium poppy discrimination. First, the Mann–Whitney U-test method was used to test the spectral reflectance difference between opium poppy and coexisting crops at each wavelength. Then, the Jeffries–Matusita distance and band correlation analysis were conducted to select the optimal wavebands for discriminating opium poppy using the significant wavebands from the test results. Finally, classification and regression tree analysis was employed to validate the classification accuracy based on the selected optimal wavebands. The results indicated that the spectral reflectance of opium poppy was significantly different from that of coexisting crops in many surveyed wavebands, and opium poppy could be discriminated using a field survey spectrum at canopy level. The best time for discriminating opium poppy from coexisting crops was around flowering time. This paper provided the prerequisite for monitoring opium poppy using satellite remote sensing data in some regions of concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents corrections to affiliation information in the paper, “Image classification using rapideye data: Integration of spectral and textual features in a random forest classifier,” (Zhang, H., et al),IEEE J. Sel. Topics Appl. Earth Observ. Remote Ses., vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 5334–5349, Dec. 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]