DISCRIMINATION OF SUGARCANE CROP AND CANE YIELD ESTIMATION USING LANDSAT AND IRS RESOURCESAT SATELLITE DATA

Abstract. The objective of this research work aims at crop acreage estimation at mill catchment level, derivation of sugarcane phenology and yield estimation at field level. The study was carried out in Kisan Sahkari Chini Mill catchment, Nanauta, Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Extensive and systematic field sampling was carried out for ground-truth observations, biophysical measurements (LAI and above/below canopy PAR) and mill-able cane yield through crop cutting experiments. Major emphasis were laid on sugarcane crop discrimination, biophysical parameter estimation, generation of phenological metrics and yield model development for sugarcane crop at mill catchment level. Sugarcane crop discrimination and its acreage estimation was done using multi-sensor satellite data. The sugarcane classification accuracies were > 92% for LISS-IV, > 86% for Landsat-8 and > 83% for LISS-III classified image. The sugarcane phenological matrices at field level derived using time-series of NDVI for a period of 2015–2016 through TIMESAT software. To retrieve the biophysical parameters particularly leaf area index, best predictive function developed with vegetation indices (EVI, NDVI, SAVI) through correlation and regression analysis along this cane yield estimation attempted with multi-date (eight-day) NDVI from Landsat OLI. Yield models developed for ratoon cane and planted cane explained variance in yield significantly with coefficient of determination (R²) values equal to 0.83 and 0.69, respectively. Similar predictive functions were also established with monthly composite dataset for village-level yield estimates with step wise regression (R² = 0.83) (P = 0.00001), Multi linear regression (MLR) (R² = 0.792) (P = 0.00081) and Random forest regression (R² = 0.466) (P = 0.038).