Remote sensing of 2017 winter crops in the Russian Federation

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to give an overview of winter crop conditions in Russia during the 2017 vegetation season. The season is characterized by relatively cold and rainy spring, which caused a winter crop development delay up to 3 weeks in most wheat-productive regions (except the south of the European part of Russia). Much attention is given to comparison of differences in winter crop development in different federal districts and to the analysis of its vegetation dynamics throughout the season. The paper shows that the shift of the season was offset by the follow-up weather conditions and does not adversely impact the overall winter crop conditions in the country. The satellite-based monitoring system VEGA was used as a data source. VEGA automatically calculates NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index) values for winter crop fields (using a seasonally updated winter crop maps) and aggregates NDVI values on a regional level, which gives an opportunity to compare the current values with the multiyear statistical mean value. Crop condition and yield assessments in this work are based on NDVI derived indicators, such as NDVI deviation from the multiyear mean (for the chosen region and the type of crop) and the difference between NDVI maximum values for the current year and for the multiyear mean. The analysis shows, that this year's winter crops productivity indicators are much higher than multiyear mean and even higher in some regions than productivity indicators for year 2016, which was of record yield.