The urban surface temperature is a complex integrated natural-human geographic phenomena; with the development of geostatistical methods and the application of multisource data, its research has gradually shifted from a single perspective to a study that integrates multiple factors such as nature and humanity. However, based on the context of the integration of natural and human factors and mutual constraints of each factor, the research on the mechanism of influence on urban habitat thermal environment needs to be further deepened. Therefore, this paper explores the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of urban surface temperature in Zhengzhou City during the summer of 2013–2020 from the perspective of multi-source data fusion, and uses the Geodetector model to quantitatively reveal the main influencing factors of urban surface temperature and the impact of superimposed factors on the compound effect of surface temperature. The results show that: (1) the urban thermal environment in the central of Zhengzhou city (region within the first ring) is obvious, and it is mainly concentrated in commercial and densely populated areas. (2) According to trend analysis, the northwest-southeast direction of the city continues to increase in temperature from 2013–2020, coupled with the direction of urban development. (3) Among the factors affecting urban surface temperature, normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), tasseled cap wetness (TCW), and human elements are particularly typical. NDVI and TCW are strongly negatively correlated with the urban thermal environment, while NDBI and human elements are strongly positively correlated. (4) Mitigation of the urban thermal environment can start with the interaction mechanism of positive and negative factors. This study provides new ideas for the mechanism analysis of spatial and temporal evolution patterns of the urban thermal environment under multifactorial constraints, and provides suggestions and decisions for promoting green and sustainable urban development.

Machine learning algorithms are crucial for crop identification and mapping. However, many works only focus on the identification results of these algorithms, but pay less attention to their classification performance and mechanism. In this paper, based on Google Earth Engine (GEE), Sentinel-2 10 m resolution images during a specific phenological period of winter wheat were obtained. Then, support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and classification and regression tree (CART) machine learning algorithms were employed to identify and map winter wheat in a large-scale area. The hyperparameters of the three machine learning algorithms were tuned by grid search and the 5-fold cross-validation method. The classification performance of the three machine learning algorithms were compared, the results of which demonstrate that SVM achieves best performance in identifying winter wheat, and its overall accuracy (OA), user’s accuracy (UA), producer’s accuracy (PA), and kappa coefficient (Kappa) are 0.94, 0.95, 0.95, and 0.92, respectively. Moreover, 50 various combinations of training and validation sets were used to analyze the generalization ability of the algorithms, and the results show that the average OA of SVM, RF, and CART are 0.93, 0.92, and 0.88, respectively, thus indicating that SVM and RF are more robust than CART. To further explore the sensitivity of SVM, RF, and CART to variations of the algorithm parameters—namely, (C and gamma), (tree and split), and (maxD and minSP)—we employed the grid search method to iterate these parameters, respectively, and to analyze the effect of these parameters on the accuracy scores and classification residuals. It was found that with the change of (C and gamma) in (0.01~1000), SVM’s maximum variation of accuracy score is up to 0.63, and the maximum variation of residuals is 76,215 km². We concluded that SVM is sensitive to the parameters (C and gamma) and presents a positive correlation. When the parameters (tree and split) change between (100~600) and (1~6), respectively, the RF’s maximum variation of accuracy score is 0.08, and the maximum variation of residuals is 1157 km², indicating that RF is low in sensitivity toward the parameters (tree and split). When the parameters (maxD and minSP) are between (10~60), the maximum accuracy change value is 0.06, and the maximum variation of residuals is 6943 km². Therefore, compared to RF, CART is sensitive to the parameters (maxD and minSP) and has poor robustness. In general, under the conditions of the hyperparameters, SVM and RF exhibit optimal classification performance, while CART has relatively inferior performance. Meanwhile, SVM, RF, and CART have different sensitivities toward the algorithm parameters; that is, SVM and CART are more sensitive to the algorithm parameters, while RF has low sensitivity toward changes in the algorithm parameters. The different parameters cause great changes in the accuracy scores and residuals, so it is necessary to determine the algorithm hyperparameters. Generally, default parameters can be used to achieve crop classification, but we recommend the enumeration method, similar to grid search, as a practical way to improve the classification performance of the algorithm if the best classification effect is expected.

The net primary productivity (NPP) and aboveground biomass mapping of crops based on remote sensing technology are not only conducive to understanding the growth and development of crops but can also be used to monitor timely agricultural information, thereby providing effective decision making for agricultural production management. To solve the saturation problem of the NDVI in the aboveground biomass mapping of crops, the original CASA model was improved using narrow-band red-edge information, which is sensitive to vegetation chlorophyll variation, and the fraction of photosynthetically active radiation (FPAR), NPP, and aboveground biomass of winter wheat and maize were mapped in the main growing seasons. Moreover, in this study, we deeply analyzed the seasonal change trends of crops’ biophysical parameters in terms of the NDVI, FPAR, actual light use efficiency (LUE), and their influence on aboveground biomass. Finally, to analyze the uncertainty of the aboveground biomass mapping of crops, we further discussed the inversion differences of FPAR with different vegetation indices. The results demonstrated that the inversion accuracies of the FPAR of the red-edge normalized vegetation index (${\mathrm{NDVI}}_{\mathrm{red}-\mathrm{edge}}$) and red-edge simple ratio vegetation index (${\mathrm{SR}}_{\mathrm{red}-\mathrm{edge}}$) were higher than those of the original CASA model. Compared with the reference data, the accuracy of aboveground biomass estimated by the improved CASA model was 0.73 and 0.70, respectively, which was 0.21 and 0.13 higher than that of the original CASA model. In addition, the analysis of the FPAR inversions of different vegetation indices showed that the inversion accuracies of the red-edge vegetation indices ${\mathrm{NDVI}}_{\mathrm{red}-\mathrm{edge}}$ and ${\mathrm{SR}}_{\mathrm{red}-\mathrm{edge}}$ were higher than those of the other vegetation indices, which confirmed that the vegetation indices involving red-edge information can more effectively retrieve FPAR and aboveground biomass of crops.

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an important parameter for many environmental and ecological models. Large-scale and long-term FVC products are critical for various applications. Currently, several global-scale FVC products have been generated with remote sensing data, such as VGT bioGEOphysical product Version 2 (GEOV2), PROBA-V bioGEOphysical product Version 3 (GEOV3) and Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) FVC products. However, studies comparing and validating these global-scale FVC products are rare. Therefore, in this study, the performances of three global-scale time series FVC products, including the GEOV2, GEOV3, and GLASS FVC products, are investigated to assess their spatial and temporal consistencies. Furthermore, reference FVC data generated from high-spatial-resolution data are used to directly evaluate the accuracy of these FVC products. The results show that these three FVC products achieve general agreements in terms of spatiotemporal consistencies over most regions. In addition, the GLASS and GEOV2 FVC products have reliable spatial and temporal completeness, whereas the GEOV3 FVC product contains much missing data over high-latitude regions, especially during wintertime. Furthermore, the GEOV3 FVC product presents higher FVC values than GEOV2 and GLASS FVC products over the equator. The main differences between the GEOV2 and GLASS FVC products occur over deciduous forests, for which the GLASS product presents slightly higher FVC values than the GEOV2 product during wintertime. Finally, temporal profiles of the GEOV2 and GLASS FVC products show better consistency than the GEOV3 FVC product, and the GLASS FVC product presents more reliable accuracy (R² = 0.7878, RMSE = 0.1212) compared with the GEOV2 (R² = 0.5798, RMSE = 0.1921) and GEOV3 (R² = 0.7744, RMSE = 0.2224) FVC products over these reference FVC data.

As an important indicator to characterize the surface vegetation, fractional vegetation cover (FVC) with high spatio-temporal resolution is essential for earth surface process simulation. However, due to technical limitations and the influence of weather, it is difficult to generate temporally continuous FVC with high spatio-temporal resolution based on a single remote-sensing data source. Therefore, the objective of this study is to explore the feasibility of generating high spatio-temporal resolution FVC based on the fusion of GaoFen-1 Wide Field View (GF-1 WFV) data and Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. Two fusion strategies were employed to identify a suitable fusion method: (i) fusing reflectance data from GF-1 WFV and MODIS firstly and then estimating FVC from the reflectance fusion result (strategy FC, Fusion_then_FVC). (ii) fusing the FVC estimated from GF-1 WFV and MODIS reflectance data directly (strategy CF, FVC_then_Fusion). The FVC generated using strategies FC and CF were evaluated based on FVC estimated from the real GF-1 WFV data and the field survey FVC, respectively. The results indicated that strategy CF achieved higher accuracies with less computational cost than those of strategy FC both in the comparisons with FVC estimated from the real GF-1 WFV (CF:R² = 0.9580, RMSE = 0.0576; FC: R² = 0.9345, RMSE = 0.0719) and the field survey FVC data (CF: R² = 0.8138, RMSE = 0.0985; FC: R² = 0.7173, RMSE = 0.1214). Strategy CF preserved spatial details more accurately than strategy FC and had a lower probability of generating abnormal values. It could be concluded that fusing GF-1 WFV and MODIS data for generating high spatio-temporal resolution FVC with good quality was feasible, and strategy CF was more suitable for generating FVC given its advantages in estimation accuracy and computational efficiency.

Africa has the largest grassland area among all grassland ecosystems in the world. As a typical agricultural and animal husbandry country in Africa, animal husbandry plays an important role in this region. The investigation of grassland resources and timely grasping the quantity and spatial distribution of grassland resources are of great significance to the stable development of local animal husbandry economy. Therefore, this paper uses Kenya as the study area to investigate the effective and fast approach for grassland mapping with 100-m resolution using the open resources in the Google Earth Engine cloud platform. The main conclusions are as follows. (1) In the feature combination optimization part of this paper, the machine learning algorithm is used to compare the scores and standard deviations of several common algorithms combined with RFE. It is concluded that the combination of RFE and random forest algorithm has the highest stability in modeling and the best feature optimization effect. (2) After feature optimization by the RFE-RF algorithm, the number of features is reduced from 12 to 8, which compressed the original feature space and reduced the redundancy of features. The optimal combination features are applied to random forest classification, and the overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of classification are 0.87 and 0.85, respectively. The eight features are: elevation, NDVI, EVI, SWIR, RVI, BLUE, RED, and LSWI. (3) There are great differences in topographic features among the local land types in the study area, and the addition of topographic features is more conducive to the recognition and classification of various land types. There exists “salt-and-pepper phenomenon” in pixel-oriented classification. Later research focus will combine the RFE-RF algorithm and the segmentation algorithm to achieve object-oriented land cover classification.