The Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar technique has provided various opportunities and challenges in agricultural activities mainly on crop management. The aim of this study is to investigate the sensitivity of 10 parameters derived from multi-temporal Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, to crop height and canopy coverage (CC) of maize, sunflower, and wheat. The correlation coefficient values indicate a high correlation for maize during the early growing stage. The coefficient determinations (R²) of 0.82 and 0.81 indicate that there is a strong relationship between the maize height and SAR parameters including VV + VH and VV, respectively. The maize CC is well correlated with VV parameter (R² = 0.73), but it is observed that at the later growing stage the correlation became weaker. This means that the sensitivity decreases with increasing vegetation cover growth. Compared to maize, the sensitivity of SAR parameters to wheat variables is often good at the early stage. However, the highest correlation with wheat height represented by Alpha (α) decomposition parameter (R² = 0.67). The sunflower height has an insignificant correlation with the majority of SAR parameters and only VH polarization shows low sensitivity (R² = 0.31). The sunflower CC shows relatively higher correlation with VV polarization (R² = 0.46) at the early stage while no considerable correlation is observed at the later stage. It is found that Sentinel-1 has a high potential for estimation of crop height and CC of the maize as a broad-leaf crop. The same is not true for sunflower as another broad-leaf crop.

Rapid urbanization worldwide offers numerous benefits but also introduces challenges, particularly concerning urban climate comfort, which affects the physical and social well-being in cities. This study examined the microclimatic characteristics of the Burç neighborhood in the historical core of Burdur city, using ENVI-Met models with temperature, relative humidity, wind and PET data collected over a 33,665 m² area at 06:00, 09:00, 12:00, 15:00, 18:00 and 21:00 on 15 August 2023. The analysis revealed that thermal comfort decreases significantly from 09:00 onwards, especially on hard surfaces like asphalt, concrete and parquet, which lack vegetation and intensify heat retention. By contrast, green areas were found to enhance bioclimatic comfort by reducing perceived temperatures by up to 20% in shaded and vegetated zones. Based on these findings, it is recommended that urban areas reduce heat-absorbing materials, such as asphalt and concrete and prioritize green spaces in landscape planning to improve thermal comfort and create more sustainable urban environments.

In this paper, the potential of using free-of-charge Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery for land cover mapping in urban areas is investigated. To this aim, we use dual-pol (VV+VH) Interferometric Wide swath mode (IW) data collected on September 16th 2015 along descending orbit over Istanbul megacity, Turkey. Data have been calibrated, terrain corrected, and filtered by a 5x5 kernel using gamma map approach. During terrain correction by using a 25m resolution SRTM DEM, SAR data has been resampled resulting into a pixel spacing of 20m. Support Vector Machines (SVM) method has been implemented as a supervised pixel based image classification to classify the dataset. During the classification, different scenarios have been applied to find out the performance of Sentinel-1 data. The training and test data have been collected from high resolution image of Google Earth. Different combinations of VV and VH polarizations have been analysed and the resulting classified images have been assessed using overall classification accuracy and Kappa coefficient. Results demonstrate that, combining opportunely dual polarization data, the overall accuracy increases up to 93.28% against 73.85% and 70.74% of using individual polarization VV and VH, respectively. Our preliminary analysis points out that dual polarimetric Sentinel-1SAR data can be effectively exploited for producing accurate land cover maps, with relevant advantages for urban planning and management of large cities.

In terms of providing various scattering mechanisms, polarimetric target decompositions provide certain benefits for the interpretation of PolSAR images. This paper tested the capabilities of different polarimetric target decompositions in crop classification, while using a recently launched ensemble learning algorithm—namely Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM). For the classification of different crops (maize, potato, wheat, sunflower, and alfalfa) in the test site, multi-temporal polarimetric C-band RADARSAT-2 images were acquired over an agricultural area near Konya, Turkey. Four different decomposition models (Cloude–Pottier, Freeman–Durden, Van Zyl, and Yamaguchi) were employed to evaluate polarimetric target decomposition for crop classification. Besides the polarimetric target decomposed parameters, the original polarimetric features (linear backscatter coefficients, coherency, and covariance matrices) were also incorporated for crop classification. The experimental results demonstrated that polarimetric target decompositions, with the exception of Cloude–Pottier, were found to be superior to the original features in terms of overall classification accuracy. The highest classification accuracy (92.07%) was achieved by Yamaguchi, whereas the lowest (75.99%) was achieved by the covariance matrix. Model-based decompositions achieved higher performance with respect to eigenvector-based decompositions in terms of class-based accuracies. Furthermore, the results emphasize the added benefits of model-based decompositions for crop classification using PolSAR data.

Cutting-edge remote sensing technology has a significant role for managing the natural resources as well as the any other applications about the earth observation. Crop monitoring is the one of these applications since remote sensing provides us accurate, up-to-date and cost-effective information about the crop types at the different temporal and spatial resolution. In this study, the potential use of three different vegetation indices of RapidEye imagery on crop type classification as well as the effect of each indices on classification accuracy were investigated. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), the Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI), and the Normalized Difference Red Edge Index (NDRE) are the three vegetation indices used in this study since all of these incorporated the near-infrared (NIR) band. RapidEye imagery is highly demanded and preferred for agricultural and forestry applications since it has red-edge and NIR bands. The study area is located in Aegean region of Turkey. Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel was used here for the Support Vector Machines (SVMs) classification. Original bands of RapidEye imagery were excluded and classification was performed with only three vegetation indices. The contribution of each indices on image classification accuracy was also tested with single band classification. Highest classification accuracy of 87, 46 % was obtained using three vegetation indices. This obtained classification accuracy is higher than the classification accuracy of any dual-combination of these vegetation indices. Results demonstrate that NDRE has the highest contribution on classification accuracy compared to the other vegetation indices and the RapidEye imagery can get satisfactory results of classification accuracy without original bands.