The estimation of leaf area index (LAI) from optical remotely sensed data based on vegetation indices (VIs) is a quick and practical approach to acquire LAI over vast areas. Reflectance in the red-edge bands is sensitive to vegetation status, and its information is thought to be useful in agricultural applications. Based on three red-edge band observations (represented as RE1, RE2, and RE3 for bands 5-7) from the Multispectral Instrument (MSI) onboard the Sentinel-2 satellite, this article aims to investigate the feasibility and performance of using red-edge bands for LAI estimates with the VI method and ground-measured LAI data sets. Sensitivity analysis from PROSAIL simulations revealed that RE1 is mainly affected by the influence of the leaf chlorophyll content, and this uncertainty should not be ignored during LAI estimation. For the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), modified simple ratio (MSR), chlorophyll index (CI), and wide dynamic range vegetation index (WDRVI), the optimal combination of Sentinel-2 bands for LAI estimation was RE2 and RE3, with a minimum root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 0.75. Four 3-band red-edge VIs were proposed to exploit the full content of the red-edge bands of Sentinel-2, and their performance in LAI estimation improved slightly. However, both 2-band red-edge VIs and 3-band red-edge VIs remained slightly saturated at high LAI levels; therefore, a segmental estimation with a threshold was suggested for large LAIs. The results indicate that the optimal 2-band red-edge VIs and proposed 3-band red-edge VIs are effective tools for crop LAI estimation in multiple-growth stages with Sentinel-2 MSI images.

This paper proposes a global prototypical network (GPN) to solve the problem of hyperspectral image classification using limited supervised samples (i.e., few-shot problem). In the proposed method, a strategy of global representations learning is adopted to train a network (f) to transfer the samples from the original data space to an embedding-feature space. In the new feature space, a vector called global prototypical representation for each class is learned. In terms of the network (f ), we designed an architecture of a deep network consisting of a dense convolutional network and the spectral-spatial attention network (SSAN). For the classification, the similarities between the un-classified samples and the global prototypical representation of each class are evaluated and the classification is finished by Nearest Neighbor (NN) classifier. Several public hyperspectral images were utilized to verify the proposed GPN. The results showed that the proposed GPN obtained the better overall accuracy compared with existing methods. In addition, the time expenditure of the proposed GPN was similar with several existing popular methods. In conclusion, the proposed GPN in this paper is state-of-the-art for solving the problem of hyperspectral image classification using limited supervised samples.

By effectively observing the land surface and obtaining farmland conditions, satellite remote sensing has played an essential role in agricultural drought monitoring over past decades. Among all remote sensing techniques, optical and thermal remote sensing have the most extended history of being utilized in drought monitoring. The primary goal of this paper is to illustrate how optical and thermal remote sensing have been and will be applied in the monitoring, assessment, and prediction of agricultural drought. We group the methods into four categories: optical, thermal, optical and thermal, and multi-source. For each category, a concise explanation is given to show the inherent mechanisms. We pay special attention to solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, which has great potential in early drought detection. Finally, we look at the future directions of agricultural drought monitoring, including (1) early detection; (2) spatio-temporal resolution; (3) organic combination of multi-source data; and (4) smart prediction and assessment based on deep learning and cloud computing.

Leaf area index (LAI), an important parameter describing a crop canopy structure and its growth status, can be estimated from remote sensing data by statistical methods involving vegetation indices (VIs). This letter reports the development of a new VI, the inverted difference vegetation index (IDVI), for crop LAI retrieval. The IDVI can overcome the saturation issue of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) at high LAI values and exhibits robust insensitivity to crop leaf water and chlorophyll content. By combining the IDVI and NDVI with a scaling factor, we constructed a novel statistical regression model with parameters that can be calibrated to a specific region to estimate the LAI. Validations on simulated data and in situ observations show that the proposed retrieval method with the IDVI is stable for low and high LAIs and obtains better results than the empirical method involving the NDVI at the regional scale. Findings in this letter will benefit future agricultural applications.

Agricultural drought is a frequent global phenomenon. Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) is a by-product of photosynthesis that can be used to monitor vegetation growth and agricultural drought. The global 0.05° spatial resolution data set has been obtained using the data-driven algorithm method. However, the broken farmland is not conducive to regional agricultural drought monitoring. Hence, 0.05° SIF products should be downscaled. On this basis, a convolutional neural network (CNN) downscaled work was conducted in this article to obtain 0.008° spatial resolution SIF results. The downscaled SIF and land surface temperature (LST) data were used to establish the temperature fluorescence dryness index (TFDI). The new TFDI was subsequently used for monitoring agricultural drought in Henan province (China) during the corn-growing season (from June to October 2013-2017). Results showed that the downscaled SIF data exhibit a good correlation with gross primary productivity (GPP) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) than 0.05° SIF products. During the study period, the soil moisture fluctuation corresponded well with precipitation, and the value of TFDI had an opposite fluctuation with soil moisture. Meanwhile, the annual averaged TFDI had a high correlation with summer corn yield (R = -0.84). In conclusion, the SIF results through the CNN-based downscaled method were reliable, and the new TFDI was suitable for region agricultural drought monitoring.