Agriculture and Wetland Applications

AbstractBased on experimental results, this chapter describes applications of SAR polarimetry to extract relevant information on agriculture and wetland scenarios by exploiting differences in the polarimetric signature of different scatterers, crop types and their development stage depending on their physical properties. Concerning agriculture, crop type mapping, soil moisture estimation and phenology estimation are reviewed, as they are ones with a clear benefit of full polarimetry over dual or single polarimetry. For crop type mapping, supervised or partially unsupervised classification schemes are used. Phenology estimation is treated as a classification problem as well, by regarding the different stages as different classes. Soil moisture estimation makes intensive use of scattering models, in order to separate soil and vegetation scattering and to invert for soil moisture from the isolated ground component. Then, applications of SAR polarimetry to wetland monitoring are considered that include the delineation of their extent and their characterisation by means of polarimetric decompositions. In the last section of the chapter, the use of a SAR polarimetric decomposition is shown for the assessment of the damages consequential to earthquakes and tsunamis.