Monitoring Crop Phenology Using NDVI Time Series from Sentinel 2 Satellite Data

Abstract

Monitoring crop phenology is a great importance to yield estimation and agriculture field management for food security, sustainable development of agriculture and to improve productivity. It's also important to understand how climate and local factors are effect on crop growth. The increasing spatial and temporal resolution of globally available satellites such as Sentinel-2 gives a unique opportunity to monitor crops systematically by vegetation index time-series. To explore the applicability of Sentinel-2 for crop phenology monitoring, we analyzed the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series with crop calendar for the year 2018 from crop fields in Samara airport area, Russia. This work has great potential to provide valuable support for monitoring crop phenology and providing precise management strategy. The dates of active tillering, jointing and maturity detected from NDVI could be useful in supporting crop modeling, extension irrigation, fertilization management, harvest determination and in last enhance food security.