LAUSR

In monsoon areas in Asia, most seasonal rice paddies are destroyed annually by flooding. To secure rice production, farmers in these areas grow off-season rice crops, which can be produced only with irrigated water. However, due to prevailing drought conditions, the cultivation of off-season rice crops cannot commence simultaneously. The availability of irrigated water is the critical factor for farmers in deciding when to begin off-season cultivation. To assess off-season rice production, a map of the cultivated area is required. Using multi-polarization/multi-temporal RADARSAT-2 data, this study aims to estimate and map the off-season rice paddies. The potential of using support vector machine classification to map off-season rice paddies with C-band SAR data was also established. Multi-temporal fine quad-polarization RADARSAT-2 data can be effectively used to estimate off-season rice cultivated areas.