Tillage Practice Discrimination Using High-Resolution PlanetScope and Sentinel-2 Imagery

Abstract Accurate and timely assessment of soil tillage practices is crucial for monitoring sustainability in agriculture. To achieve more site-specific discrimination, it is necessary to understand the spectral and temporal properties of tillage practices across seasons. This study presents developments in tillage-practice discrimination by comparing two high-resolution remote sensing datasets, PlanetScope and Sentinel-2, to characterise and discriminate fields under intensive tillage (IT) and conservation tillage (CT) in the winter and spring seasons. A field experiment was conducted at an experimental site in the United Kingdom, collecting data on tillage practices in 2022–23 and 2023–24. We analysed the spectral and temporal characteristics of two tillage types and subsequently classified them using the random forest (RF) algorithm. Results showed reflectance differences between the two tillage treatments during the early period in both seasons. We also revealed that green, red-edge, and near-infrared wavelengths were relevant for the classification. PlanetScope showed greater potential for classifying tillage (OA = 70–80%), whereas Sentinel-2 exhibited lower performance (OA = 53–73%). Models from the winter achieved higher accuracy scores than those from the spring period, suggesting a seasonal variation in tillage discrimination. The findings highlight the utility of high-resolution satellite-based data, combined with machine learning, for mapping tillage practices and advancing precision agriculture.