USING MULTI-TEMPORAL REMOTE SENSING DATA TO ANALYZE THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL PATTERNS OF DRY SEASON RICE PRODUCTION IN BANGLADESH

Abstract. Remote sensing in the optical domain is widely used in agricultural monitoring; however, such initiatives pose a challenge for developing countries due to a lack of high quality in situ information. Our proposed methodology could help developing countries bridge this gap by demonstrating the potential to quantify patterns of dry season rice production in Bangladesh. To analyze approximately 90,000 km2 of cultivated land in Bangladesh at 30 m spatial resolution, we used two decades of remote sensing data from the Landsat archive and Google Earth Engine (GEE), a cloud-based geospatial data analysis platform built on Google infrastructure and capable of processing petabyte-scale remote sensing data. We reconstructed the seasonal patterns of vegetation indices (VIs) for each pixel using a harmonic time series (HTS) model, which minimizes the effects of missing observations and noise. Next, we combined the seasonality information of VIs with our knowledge of rice cultivation systems in Bangladesh to delineate rice areas in the dry season, which are predominantly hybrid and High Yielding Varieties (HYV). Based on historical Landsat imagery, the harmonic time series of vegetation indices (HTS-VIs) model estimated 4.605 million ha, 3.519 million ha, and 4.021 million ha of rice production for Bangladesh in 2005, 2010, and 2015 respectively. Fine spatial scale information on HYV rice over the last 20 years will greatly improve our understanding of double-cropped rice systems, current status of production, and potential for HYV rice adoption in Bangladesh during the dry season.