Monitoring spatio-temporal changes in winter wheat planting areas is of high importance for the evaluation of food security. This is particularly the case in China, having the world’s largest population and experiencing rapid urban expansion, concurrently, it puts high pressure on food demands and the availability of arable land. The relatively high spatial resolution of Landsat is required to resolve the historical mapping of smallholder wheat fields in China. However, accurate Landsat-based mapping of winter wheat planting dynamics over recent decades have not been conducted for China, or anywhere else globally. Based on all available Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI images (~28,826 tiles) using Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing and a Random Forest machine-learning classifier, we analyzed spatio-temporal dynamics in winter wheat planting areas during 1999–2019 in the North China Plain (NCP). We applied a median value of 30-day sliding windows to fill in potential data gaps in the available Landsat images, and six EVI-based phenological features were then extracted to discriminate winter wheat from other land cover types. Reference data for training and validation were extracted from high-resolution imagery available via Google Earth™ online mapping service, Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery. We ran a sensitivity analysis to derive the optimal training sample class ratio (β = 1.8) accounting for the unbalanced distribution of land-cover types. We mapped winter wheat planting areas for 1999–2019 with overall accuracies ranging from 82% to 99% and the user’s/producer’s accuracies of winter wheat range between 90% and 99%. We observed an overall increase in winter wheat planting areas of 1.42 × 10⁶ ha in the NCP as compared to the year 2000, with a significant increase in the Shandong and Hebei provinces (p < 0.05). This result contrasts the general discourse suggesting a decline in croplands (e.g., rapid urbanization) and climate change-induced unfavorable cropping conditions in the NCP. This suggests adjustments of the winter wheat planting area over time to satisfy wheat supply in relation to food security. This study highlights the application of Landsat images through GEE in documenting spatio-temporal dynamics of winter wheat planting areas for adequate management of cropping systems and assessing food security in China.

The existing hyperspectral vegetation indices used for estimating the canopy leaf area index (LAI) of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) performed well, but the use of such indices at late growth stages can lead to inaccurate results. To improve the performance of LAI models for wheat in late growth stages, the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) method was applied in this study and used to decompose the canopy reflectance and its first derivative into wavelet coefficients. The correlation scalograms of wavelet coefficients and the LAI were then constructed and used to extract the top 1% correlated region as the wavelet feature. The canopy LAI estimation model for late growth wheat was established at last and compared with models based on 12 different types of hyperspectral vegetation indices. The results showed that, compared with the estimation models using the hyperspectral vegetation indices (for which the $R2$ values were all less than 0.15 and the root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) were greater than 1), the CWT-based canopy LAI estimation model for late growth wheat had obvious improvements in accuracy (maximum $R2$ of 0.53 and minimum of RMSE of 0.78). Hence, this new method shows promise for use in agricultural and ecological applications.

As a widely used ground-based optical instrument, the LAI-2000 or LAI-2200 plant canopy analyzer (PCA) (Li-Cor, Inc., Lincoln, NE) is designed to measure the plant effective leaf area index (L_e) by measuring the canopy gap fraction at several limited or discrete view zenith angles (VZAs) (usually five VZAs: 7, 23, 38, 53, and 68°) based on Miller’s equation. Miller’s equation requires the probability of radiative transmission through the canopy to be measured over the hemisphere, i.e., VZAs in the range from 0 to 90°. However, the PCA view angle ranges are confined to several limited ranges or discrete sectors. The magnitude of the error produced by the discretization of VZAs in the leaf area index measurements remains difficult to determine. In this study, a theoretical deduction was first presented to definitely prove why the limited or discrete VZAs or ranges can affect the L_e measured with the PCA, and the specific error caused by the limited or discrete VZAs was described quantitatively. The results show that: (1) the weight coefficient of the last PCA ring is the main cause of the error; (2) the error is closely related to the leaf inclination angles (IAs)—the L_e measured with the PCA can be significantly overestimated for canopies with planophile IAs, whereas it can be underestimated for erectophile IAs; and (3) the error can be enhanced with the increment of the discrete degree of PCA rings or VZAs, such as using four or three PCA rings. Two corrections for the error are presented and validated in three crop canopies. Interestingly, although the leaf IA type cannot influence the L_e calculated by Miller’s equation in the hemispheric space, it affects the L_e measured with the PCA using the discrete form of Miller’s equation for several discrete VZAs.

Particle size is an important factor for determining the concentration of suspended particle matter (SPM) in water using optical remotely sensed data. We collected reflectance spectra of five SPM samples with different particle sizes in a controlled laboratory experiment using a spectroradiometer. The theoretical relationship between particle size distributions and backscattering coefficient was deduced based on a spectral reflectance model. The backscattering coefficient of the complete SPM sample can be computed using the linear weighted combination of four percentages of different subsamples. The spectral similarity scale results indicate the optimal optical bands and boundary conditions for particle size and concentration of SPM remote sensing. The particle size can be evaluated by optical remote sensing to improve the applicability and precision of remote sensing models for SPM concentration inversion.

Features of SBUV earth image are assessed based on all-time simulation A optimal spectral range is confirmed for recognizing available earth limb imag...