New research at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting

Caitlin Kontgis presented her work, Understanding transitions in rice paddy extent and management in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta using Landsat data, at the 2014 AGU meeting in San Francisco, California.  This work demonstrates how to map rice agriculture using fine-scale Landsat data by generating dense time stacks over multiple growing seasons.  Second, the new approach differentiates between single-, double-, and triple-cropped rice paddies in the region, again by exploiting temporally dense EVI trajectories.  The results show that this new approach can map rice paddy agriculture with over 90% accuracy at a much finer spatial resolution than has ever been produced.  In addition, this research demonstrates that triple-cropped rice fields have nearly doubled in area from 2000 to 2010, from one-third of total rice area to nearly two-thirds of paddy area.  

Caitlin will submit this work for publication in Remote Sensing of Environment.