Application of Landscape Metrics and Object-Oriented Remote Sensing to Detect the Spatial Arrangement of Agricultural Land

Safdary Rezvan (), Soffianian Alireza and Pourmanafi Saeid
Additional contact information
Safdary Rezvan: Department of Environment, Faculty of Natural resources and Environment, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
Soffianian Alireza: Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Natural Resources, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran
Pourmanafi Saeid: Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Natural Resources, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran

Quaestiones Geographicae, 2022, vol. 41, issue 1, 25-35

Abstract: This study aims to investigate crop selection and spatial patterns of agricultural fields in a drought-affected region in Isfahan Province, central Iran. Based on field surveys portraying growth stages of the main crops including wheat, alfalfa, vegetables and fruit trees, three Landsat 8 operational land imager (OLI) images were acquired on March 15 (L1), June 27 (L2) and October 1 (L3), 2015. After performing radiometric and atmospheric corrections, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) maps of the images were produced and introduced to the Multi-Resolution Segmentation algorithm to delineate agricultural fields. An NDVI-based decision algorithm was then developed to identify crops devoted to each field. Finally, a set of landscape metrics including Number of Patches (NP), mean patch size (MPS), mean shape index (MSI), perimeter-to-area ratio (PARA) and Euclidian Nearest Neighborhood Distance (ENN) was utilized to evaluate their respective spatial formation. The results showed that nearly 46% of fields are devoted to wheat indicating that the landscape has been dramatically shifted towards wheat monoculture farming. Moreover, the farmers’ inclination to grow crops in large fields (approximate area of 1 ha) with more regular geometric shapes are considered as an effective way of optimising water use efficiency in areas experiencing significant water shortage.

Keywords: crop type; segmentation; landscape metrics; Iran (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/quageo-2022-0002 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vrs:quageo:v:41:y:2022:i:1:p:25-35:n:4

DOI: 10.2478/quageo-2022-0002

Access Statistics for this article

Quaestiones Geographicae is currently edited by Andrzej Kostrzewski

More articles in Quaestiones Geographicae from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().