Mapping winter cover crops using remote sensing of crop phenology

Winter cover crops (WCC) are an effective agricultural conservation practice for improving soil health and water quality. Several U.S. states have established incentive programs to promote planting WCC between cash crop rotations. In recent years, the area planted with WCC has steadily increased due to these efforts, although the planting area varies among states. Since these programs are largely led by individual counties or state programs, there is no centralized data repository that quantifies the total WCC planted annually or their locations. Therefore, there is a practical need to identify fields that have been planted with WCC, as well as to quantify the total planted area both during and after the growing season. Furthermore, incentive programs often require verification that WCC were planted to release payments to participating growers in a timely manner. Satellite remote sensing time series can provide information on WCC growth status. However, it remains unclear what kind of WCC the remote sensing data detects. For example, separating WCC from weeds and winter commodity crops remains a challenge. Additionally, a binary classification of WCC presence and absence cannot accurately describe the category and performance of the WCC. This paper presents a new remote sensing phenology-based approach to map WCC likelihood. We assessed model predictions of WCC likelihood using WCC planting records and ground observations over fields at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) from 2018 to 2024. Regional WCC maps were assessed using the Maryland Department of Agriculture's records of WCC fields enrolled in the 2019 and 2020 incentive programs. Our results show that the balanced overall accuracy for WCC and non-WCC ranges from 75% to 85% but could exceed 90%, with limited training samples. However, the high accuracy of WCC corresponds with low accuracy for non-WCC due to confusion with weeds and perennial grasses. Early-season detection yields promising results, with overall accuracies comparable to late-season detection. The after-season detection can differentiate between winter cereal grain cash crops and incentive WCC based on the ending date of the growing season. With a small set of WCC samples and management information, the phenology-based mapping approach offers a rapid and scalable solution for mapping WCC over a large region during or after each WCC growing season.