Monitoring of Planting Paddy Rice with Complex Cropping Pattern in the Tropical Humid Climate Region Using Landsat and Modis Data - a Case of West Java, Indonesia -

This study aimed at the development of method of monitoring paddy rice planting applicable to areas located in the tropical humid climate region. The method was integrated with two steps of procedure. As the first step, we attempted to produce land use map which discriminated paddy field using multi-temporal Landsat data. In order to remove the effect of cloud cover, a new method of land use classification was introduced. This method employed five indices, which could represent the specific condition of ground surface on soil, vegetation or water, derived from Landsat data, and discriminated land use by using maximum values of indices for multi-temporal scenes. The results showed meaningful improvement in accuracy of discrimination compared to conventional method of land use classification using spectral information of Landsat data. Paddy field extracted by this step was used as paddy mask data in the following step. The second step was to construct a method to judge the time of rice planting using MODIS data. In this study, we examined the time series of EVI (Enhance Vegetation Index) and NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) obtained from 16-day composite MODIS vegetation product dataset in combination with statistical information obtained from local administrative offices. We developed a scheme that could estimate the place of paddy rice planting after about two months from planting. The results showed a capability of identifying time of planting rice for extensive part of West Java using MODIS data and contributed to analyze the pattern of spatial transition of area of planting for recent years.