Caitlin Kontgis's paper published in Remote Sensing of Environment

PhD student Caitlin Kontgis has just published her work Mapping rice paddy extent and intensification in the Vietnamese Mekong River Delta with dense time stacks of Landsat data in the top journal in the field of remote sensing, Remote Sensing of Environment.  This work focuses on the development of a new change detection method involving dense time stacks of Landsat (30-m) satellite data to monitor changes in rice paddy area as well as shifts in the number of annual harvests for two time points (circa 2000, circa 2010) in the Mekong Delta.  The results suggest that  rice has intensified in the region from 2000 to 2010, with triple-cropped fields expanding from approximately 34% to 62% of rice paddy agriculture.

Make sure to take a look at this paper (available here) -- recent comments on the paper via the Elsevier website have highlighted that the novel use of Landsat data to monitor crop systems is a 'game-changer' for policy makers.  Exciting stuff!

In Kontgis et al. (2015), the location and extent of rice paddy in the Mekong River Delta were delineated using the confluence of NDWI standard deviation, EVI standard deviation, and EVI mean.