Estimating the Number of Harvests Per Rice Paddy Field

The European Space Agency’s Sentinel 1 satellite acquires global synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, making it particularly well-suited for analyzing tropical regions that may be covered in clouds and therefore concealed from optical data. Here, we focus our attention on rice, a predominant crop in the tropics, and leverage Sentinel 1 data to identify field boundaries, classify fields as rice or not rice, and estimate the number of times each rice field is harvested during a year. Using the Descartes Labs Platform to conduct this analysis allows us to scale our models to run across Asia, providing a region-wide analysis of rice extent and management.