The 10-m crop type maps in Northeast China during 2017–2019

• Published in: Scientific data Vol. 8; no. 1; p. 41
• Main Authors: You, Nanshan, Dong, Jinwei, Huang, Jianxi, Du, Guoming, Zhang, Geli, He, Yingli, Yang, Tong, Di, Yuanyuan, Xiao, Xiangming
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 02.02.2021; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 706/1143; 706/2808; Crop rotation; Crops; Data collection; Data Descriptor; Food security; Humanities and Social Sciences; Learning algorithms; Machine learning; Mapping; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); China
• ISSN: 2052-4463; 2052-4463
• DOI: 10.1038/s41597-021-00827-9

Northeast China is the leading grain production region in China where one-fifth of the national grain is produced; however, consistent and reliable crop maps are still unavailable, impeding crop management decisions for regional and national food security. Here, we produced annual 10-m crop maps of the major crops (maize, soybean, and rice) in Northeast China from 2017 to 2019, by using (1) a hierarchical mapping strategy (cropland mapping followed by crop classification), (2) agro-climate zone-specific random forest classifiers, (3) interpolated and smoothed 10-day Sentinel-2 time series data, and (4) optimized features from spectral, temporal, and texture characteristics of the land surface. The resultant maps have high overall accuracies (OA) spanning from 0.81 to 0.86 based on abundant ground truth data. The satellite estimates agreed well with the statistical data for most of the municipalities (R 2  ≥ 0.83, p < 0.01). This is the first effort on regional annual crop mapping in China at the 10-m resolution, which permits assessing the performance of the soybean rejuvenation plan and crop rotation practice in China. Measurement(s) area of different crop types • area of cropland Technology Type(s) machine learning Factor Type(s) type of crop • year of data collection Sample Characteristic - Environment cultivated environment • cropland ecosystem Sample Characteristic - Location Northeast China • China Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.13567526