Wheat Yield for Major Producing Countries

What We Do

This project develops crop type mapping and area estimation for soybean, wheat, and maize, as well as in-season estimates of wheat area with corresponding uncertainties to major wheat producing/export countries. In-season national-scale forecasts build on previous work to forecast national wheat yields two months before harvest within 10% of final yields.

Location

Major wheat producing/export countries - US, Ukraine, Russia, Argentina, France and Germany, together accounting for 60% of wheat exports.

How Satellites Make This Work

Remote Sensing data: Harmonized Landsat/S2 surface reflectance and 1km BRDF-corrected daily NDVI and LAI

Crop mapping: Crop type mapping and area estimation for soybean, wheat, and maize.

Crop area estimation: In-season estimates of wheat area with corresponding uncertainties to major wheat producing/export countries

Crop yield assessment: In season national-scale forecasts will build on previous work for different countries using AVHRR, MODIS and VIIRS data, to forecast national wheat yields two months before harvest within 10% of final yields. The approach will be extended to other crops and adapted to moderate resolution Landsat and S2 data in regions with small fields, leveraging ongoing MuSLI work.

What’s Happening

Dr. Belen Franch presented in May 2019 at the ESA conference, Living Planet Symposium, providing an overview of this work. View her presentation (Powerpoint).

Lead

Eric Vermote, NASA, UMD

Team Members

Belen Franch, University of Maryland & Universitat de Valencia

Sergii Skakun, University of Maryland

Learn More

Article: Franch, B., Vermote, E. F., Skakun, S., Roger, J. C., Becker-Reshef, I., Murphy, E., & Justice, C. (2019). Remote sensing based yield monitoring: Application to winter wheat in United States and Ukraine. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 76, 112-127.