Improving Crop-Type Mapping in Fragmented Agricultural Landscapes with Parcel Constraints and HLSS30-Derived Phenological Features

Accurate crop-type mapping is essential for agricultural monitoring, but pixel-based products often suffer from within-field fragmentation, boundary noise, and limited consistency with field management units. This study developed a parcel-constrained crop classification approach using the HLSS30 product from the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel 2 framework. HLSS30 data preprocessing and parcel-level feature extraction were conducted in Google Earth Engine, and parcel-level spectral, vegetation index, and phenological features were used to train a Random Forest classifier with feature selection and nested stratified cross-validation. A pixel-level classification experiment was used as the baseline for comparison. The HLSS30 time series captured class specific differences in canopy establishment, peak greenness, and senescence. Compared with the pixel-level baseline, parcel-level classification increased overall accuracy from 76.5% to 89.4%, increased Kappa from 0.690 to 0.859, and achieved a macro F1 score of 0.8677. Parcel constraints also reduced salt and pepper noise, improved field-level spatial coherence, and supported reliability interpretation through posterior entropy and parcel internal variability. These results indicate that HLSS30-derived temporal and phenological features, when summarized within reliable crop parcel boundaries, provide an efficient and interpretable basis for regional multi-crop mapping in fragmented agricultural landscapes.

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Publication Details

Journal
Remote Sensing
Published
2026-09-13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18183149
Primary Topic
Remote Sensing in Agriculture
Type
article
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Improving Crop-Type Mapping in Fragmented Agricultural Landscapes with Parcel Constraints and HLSS30-Derived Phenological Features

Frank Hang Xu, Zui Tao, Yong Zhang, Zhuo Wu et al.
Remote Sensing
Remote Sensing in Agriculture
article

Improving Crop-Type Mapping in Fragmented Agricultural Landscapes with Parcel Constraints and HLSS30-Derived Phenological Features

Frank Hang Xu, Zui Tao, Yong Zhang, Zhuo Wu, Qianhua Ren, Xingming Zheng
article en

Abstract

Accurate crop-type mapping is essential for agricultural monitoring, but pixel-based products often suffer from within-field fragmentation, boundary noise, and limited consistency with field management units. This study developed a parcel-constrained crop classification approach using the HLSS30 product from the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel 2 framework. HLSS30 data preprocessing and parcel-level feature extraction were conducted in Google Earth Engine, and parcel-level spectral, vegetation index, and phenological features were used to train a Random Forest classifier with feature selection and nested stratified cross-validation. A pixel-level classification experiment was used as the baseline for comparison. The HLSS30 time series captured class specific differences in canopy establishment, peak greenness, and senescence. Compared with the pixel-level baseline, parcel-level classification increased overall accuracy from 76.5% to 89.4%, increased Kappa from 0.690 to 0.859, and achieved a macro F1 score of 0.8677. Parcel constraints also reduced salt and pepper noise, improved field-level spatial coherence, and supported reliability interpretation through posterior entropy and parcel internal variability. These results indicate that HLSS30-derived temporal and phenological features, when summarized within reliable crop parcel boundaries, provide an efficient and interpretable basis for regional multi-crop mapping in fragmented agricultural landscapes.

Remote SensingVol. 18(18)
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN), Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology (CN), Aerospace Information Research Institute (CN), Changchun University (CN)
Zero hunger
Openalex Percentile: Top 11%
Remote Sensing in Agriculture
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