This study proposed a colorimetric transformation and spectral features-based oilseed rape extraction algorithm (CSRA) to map oilseed rape at the provincial scale as a first step towards country-scale coverage. Using a stepwise analysis strategy, our method gradually separates vegetation from non-vegetation, crop from non-crop, and oilseed rape from winter wheat. The wide-field view (WFV) images from Chinese Gaofen satellite no. 1 (GF-1) at six continuous flowering stages in Wuxue City, Hubei Province, China are used to extract the unique characteristics of oilseed rape during the flowering period and predict the parameter of the CSRA method. The oilseed rape maps of Hubei Province from 2014 to 2017 are obtained automatically based on the CSRA method using GF-1 WFV images. As a result, the CSRA-derived provincial oilseed rape maps achieved at least 85% overall accuracy of spatial consistency when comparing with local reference oilseed rape maps and lower than 20% absolute error of provincial planting areas when comparing with agricultural census data. The robustness of the CSRA method is also tested on other satellite images including one panchromatic and multispectral image from GF-2 and two RapidEye images. Moreover, the comparison between the CSRA and other previous methods is discussed using the six GF-1 WFV images of Wuxue City, showing the proposed method has better mapping accuracy than other tested methods. These results highlight the potential of our method for accurate extraction and regional mapping capacity for oilseed rape. [6,7]. Thus, using remote sensing data to map the planting areas of OR has become a feasible and efficient approach in recent years.Previous studies about extracting OR by means of remote sensing can be divided into two categories. The first category separates OR from other land cover types using hyperspectral remote sensing data based on the detailed spectral difference. For example, Wilson et al. [8] assessed the spectral separability between OR and four other crop types with a stepwise discriminant analysis, and found that 23 bands could be used to effectively distinguish those five crop types in a suitable situation. Pan et al. [9] noticed that the multi-range spectral feature fitting method could yield a better performance in OR planting area extraction using Hyperion imagery [9]. She et al. [10] found the special movement of the red edge of OR from its original position towards the blue band direction during the flowering period to the pods period and applied to extract OR based on Hyperion imagery. However, the shortages of small spatial coverage, as well as expensive cost of hyperspectral images, limit its application on regional OR mapping.The second category mainly applies supervised classification methods on multispectral images during the flowering period to identify and extract OR at the local scale, since the flowering period is the best phenology stage of identifying OR from other crops [11]. As a member of the Brassicaceae family, OR appears as bright-yellow flower...