A phenology-based spectral and temporal feature selection method for crop mapping from satellite time series

•PSTFS optimizes crop type classifications by fully mining crop phenology information.•PSTFS ranks features by importance and then iteratively prunes redundant features.•We used an SVM classifier to produce a high-quality corn map of Heilongjiang, China.•The optimal features identified by PSTFS are key crop phenological characteristics.•PSTFS can be extended to other land cover types and other dense remote sensing data.