Remote sensing for cropland soils at the regional scale

Kurzfassung

Uta Heiden, German Aerospace Center (DLR), addresses the challenges of observing soils from optical satellite platforms. She introduces the technique of soil composite mapping (SCMaP) that creates a reflectance signal for each bare soil pixel based on a time series of images. The advantage of such system is that the coverage of cropland area is much larger than for single images and that the signal is more stable for each pixel as a result of averaging. She addresses the challenges of defining thresholds for spectral indices allowing to create an optimal bare soil mask and demonstrates the SCMaP product suite. These products can be used for soil property algorithms but also for indicators of management practices such as bare soil frequency and seasonality.