Agricultural land use change substantially affects climate, water, ecosystems, biodiversity, and human welfare. In recent decades, due to increasing population and food demand and the backdrop of global warming, croplands have been expanding into higher latitude regions. One such hotspot is paddy rice expansion in northeast China. However, there are no maps available for documenting the spatial and temporal patterns of continuous paddy rice expansion. In this study, we developed an automated, Landsat-based paddy rice mapping (Landsat-RICE) system that uses time series Landsat images and a phenology-based algorithm based on the unique spectral characteristics of paddy rice during the flooding/transplanting phase. As a pilot study, we analyzed all the available Landsat images from 1986 to 2010 (498 scenes) in one tile (path/row 113/27) of northeast China, which tracked paddy rice expansion in epochs with five-year increments (1986-1990, 1991-1995, 1996-2000, 2001-2005, and 2006-2010). Several maps of land cover types (barren land and built-up land; evergreen, deciduous and sparse vegetation types; and water-related land cover types such as permanent water body, mixed pixels of water and vegetation, spring flooded wetlands and summer flooded land) were generated as masks. Air temperature was used to define phenology timing and crop calendar, which were then used to select Landsat images in the phenology-based algorithms for paddy rice and masks. The resultant maps of paddy rice in the five epochs were evaluated using validation samples from multiple sources, and the overall accuracies and Kappa coefficients ranged from 84 to 95% and 0.6-0.9, respectively. The paddy rice area in the study area substantially increased from 1986 to 2010, particularly after the 1990s. This study demonstrates the potential of the Landsat-RICE system and time series Landsat images for tracking agricultural land use changes at 30-m resolution in the temperate zone with single crop cultivation.

Knowledge of the area and spatial distribution of paddy rice is important for assessment of food security, management of water resources, and estimation of greenhouse gas (methane) emissions. Paddy rice agriculture has expanded rapidly in northeastern China in the last decade, but there are no updated maps of paddy rice fields in the region. Existing algorithms for identifying paddy rice fields are based on the unique physical features of paddy rice during the flooding and transplanting phases and use vegetation indices that are sensitive to the dynamics of the canopy and surface water content. However, the flooding phenomena in high latitude area could also be from spring snowmelt flooding. We used land surface temperature (LST) data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor to determine the temporal window of flooding and rice transplantation over a year to improve the existing phenology-based approach. Other land cover types (e.g., evergreen vegetation, permanent water bodies, and sparse vegetation) with potential influences on paddy rice identification were removed (masked out) due to their different temporal profiles. The accuracy assessment using high-resolution images showed that the resultant MODIS-derived paddy rice map of northeastern China in 2010 had a high accuracy (producer and user accuracies of 92% and 96%, respectively). The MODIS-based map also had a comparable accuracy to the 2010 Landsat-based National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) of China in terms of both area and spatial pattern. This study demonstrated that our improved algorithm by using both thermal and optical MODIS data, provides a robust, simple and automated approach to identify and map paddy rice fields in temperate and cold temperate zones, the northern frontier of rice planting.

Accurate and updated finer resolution maps of rubber plantations and stand ages are needed to understand and assess the impacts of rubber plantations on regional ecosystem processes. This study presented a simple method for mapping rubber plantation areas and their stand ages by integration of PALSAR 50-m mosaic images and multi-temporal Landsat TM/ETM+ images. The L-band PALSAR 50-m mosaic images were used to map forests (including both natural forests and rubber trees) and non-forests. For those PALSAR-based forest pixels, we analyzed the multi-temporal Landsat TM/ETM+ images from 2000 to 2009. We first studied phenological signatures of deciduous rubber plantations (defoliation and foliation) and natural forests through analysis of surface reflectance, Normal Difference OPEN ACCESSRemote Sens. 2015, 7 1049Vegetation Index (NDVI), Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), and Land Surface Water Index (LSWI) and generated a map of rubber plantations in 2009. We then analyzed phenological signatures of rubber plantations with different stand ages and generated a map, in 2009, of rubber plantation stand ages (≤5, 6-10, >10 years-old) based on multi-temporal Landsat images. The resultant maps clearly illustrated how rubber plantations have expanded into the mountains in the study area over the years. The results in this study demonstrate the potential of integrating microwave (e.g., PALSAR) and optical remote sensing in the characterization of rubber plantations and their expansion over time.