Monitoring winter crop areas during wartime: remote sensing support for Ukraine’s agricultural statistics

Timely and transparent agricultural statistics are essential for safeguarding global food security. When the war in Ukraine disrupted agricultural reporting - particularly in Russian-held territories - complementary and/or alternative approaches were needed to produce reliable statistics. We developed a fully remote sensing–based framework to estimate areas of two major crops, wheat and rapeseed, from 2022 to 2025. Using Planet and Sentinel-1/2 imagery, we applied clustering techniques to generate in-season crop type maps that supported stratified random sampling in sample-based area estimation, using remotely interpreted reference data. Our estimates closely matched official statistics in Government-controlled areas (RMSE = 0.138 and 0.32 million hectares (Mha) for wheat and rapeseed, respectively), while filling critical data gaps in Russian-controlled regions. Between 2022 and 2025, wheat area declined from 5.14 ± 0.52 to 4.84 ± 0.25 Mha in Government-controlled areas and from 2.06 ± 0.16 to 1.55 ± 0.09 Mha in Russian-held regions. Rapeseed expanded from 1.16 ± 0.17 to 1.47 ± 0.23 Mha (2022–2025) in Government-controlled territories but collapsed in Russian-held areas, from 0.17 ± 0.01 to 0.05 ± 0.01 Mha. Our findings underscore the critical role of remote sensing in providing timely, transparent, and independent agricultural statistics to support informed food security and market-stabilizing decision-making.