The dry aboveground biomass (AGB) is an important parameter in assessing crop growth and predicting yield. This study aims to ascertain the optimal methods for the spectroscopic estimation of winter oilseed rape (WOR) biomass. The different fertilizer-N gradients WOR were planted to collect biomass data and canopy hyperspectral data in two years of field experiments. Correlation analyses and partial least squares regression (PLSR) were performed between canopy hyperspectral data and AGB, and the linear and non-linear regression models simulated the quantitative relation between the vegetation indices (VIs) and AGB at four different growth stages (seeding, bolting, flowering, and pod stage). The results indicated that VIs that were derived from canopy hyperspectral data could estimate AGB accurately: (1) At the seeding and bolting stage, the CIred edge showed excellent performance with the higher accuracy (R² ranged from 0.60–0.95) as compared to the other six VIs (Green chlorophyll index (CIgreen), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), Green normalized difference vegetation index (GNDVI), ratio vegetation index (RVI), DVI, and soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI)); (2) Correlation analyses and PLSR can effectively extract the feature wavelengths (800 nm and 1200 nm) for biomass estimation. The modified vegetation indices NDVI (800, 1200) significantly improved AGB estimation accuracy (R² > 0.80, RMSE < 1530 kg/hm², RPD > 2.3) without saturation phenomenon at the total for four stages, and retained good robustness and reduced the influence of flower and pod for estimating AGB; (3) it was vital to pay more attention to the near-infrared (NIR) bands that could represent WOR growth phenology, and selecting suitable VIs and modeling algorithms could also have a relatively large effect on the success of AGB estimation. The overall results indicated that WOR AGB could be reliably estimated by canopy hyperspectral data, although the plant architecture and coverage of WOR were significantly different during its entire growing period.

This study proposed a colorimetric transformation and spectral features-based oilseed rape extraction algorithm (CSRA) to map oilseed rape at the provincial scale as a first step towards country-scale coverage. Using a stepwise analysis strategy, our method gradually separates vegetation from non-vegetation, crop from non-crop, and oilseed rape from winter wheat. The wide-field view (WFV) images from Chinese Gaofen satellite no. 1 (GF-1) at six continuous flowering stages in Wuxue City, Hubei Province, China are used to extract the unique characteristics of oilseed rape during the flowering period and predict the parameter of the CSRA method. The oilseed rape maps of Hubei Province from 2014 to 2017 are obtained automatically based on the CSRA method using GF-1 WFV images. As a result, the CSRA-derived provincial oilseed rape maps achieved at least 85% overall accuracy of spatial consistency when comparing with local reference oilseed rape maps and lower than 20% absolute error of provincial planting areas when comparing with agricultural census data. The robustness of the CSRA method is also tested on other satellite images including one panchromatic and multispectral image from GF-2 and two RapidEye images. Moreover, the comparison between the CSRA and other previous methods is discussed using the six GF-1 WFV images of Wuxue City, showing the proposed method has better mapping accuracy than other tested methods. These results highlight the potential of our method for accurate extraction and regional mapping capacity for oilseed rape.