Chiharu Hongo1*, Takaaki Furukawa1, Gunardi Sigit2, Masayasu Maki3, Koki Honma3, Koshi Yoshida4, Kazuo Oki5, Hiroaki Shirakawa6
1* Center for Environmental Remote Sensing, Chiba University
2 Regional Office of Food Crops Service West Jawa Province, Indonesia
3 Kyoto University, 4 Ibaraki University, 5 The University of Tokyo, 6 Nagoya University
The environmental conservation and food production is one of the most critical issues that we have to make best efforts to solve from now on in every country. The remote sensing agricultural research, especially related to rice production and rice field management is very important for Asian countries, because rice is the staple food for the people and, on the other side, Asian agriculture frequently suffers from heavy losses caused by meteorological events. Considering these matters, it is a good idea to develop an efficient rice cultivation support system based on a concept of the precision agriculture which can effectively increase the rice production and also realize the environmental conservation.
In this study, to assess the feasibility of the estimating rice yield using remotely sensed data, the investigation of the relation between annual rice production and cumulative LAI derived from the agricultural statistical data and MODIS LAI 8days composite data was carried out in west Jawa, Indonesia.
The result shows significant positive correlation between the annual rice production and cumulative LAI of each month except for February and December. The correlation coefficients in January, May and September, a couple of months before harvesting season, were relatively high against other months. It was possible to estimate the annual rice production of 2008 using the cumulative LAI of January, May and September from 2003 to 2007 (r=0.664, p<0.01). Moreover, the correlation coefficient became higher when limited to three sub-districts where the irrigation rate was more than 80% (r=0.866, p<0.01).
This study indicates that the cumulative LAI of remotely sensed data is applicable to the estimation of rice production amount in wide areas, and the creation of each estimation equation for the irrigated paddy fields and the rain fed paddy fields will contribute to the improvement the estimation accuracy of the annual rice production.
