Complementarity of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 Data for Mapping Agricultural Areas in Senegal

The small size of agricultural plots is the main difficulty for crops mapping with remote sensing data in the Sahelian region of Africa. The study aims to combine Sentinel-1 (radar) and Sentinel-2 (Optic) data to discriminate millet, maize and peanut crops. Training plots were used in order to analyse temporal variation of the three crops’ signals. The NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) was able to differentiate crops only at the end of the rainy season (October). The optical data as well as the radar ones could not easily discriminate the three crops during the growing season, because in that period vegetation cover is low, and soil contribution to the signals (due to roughness and moisture) was more important than that of real vegetation. However, the ratio of VH/VV (VH: incident signal in vertical polarization and reflected signal in horizontal polarization;VV: incident signal in vertical polarization and reflected signal in horizontal polarization) gave a difference between millet and the two other crops at the beginning cultural season (July 11). Difference appears from the second third of September when the harvest of cereals crops (millet and maize) began. From middle of October, the peanut signal dropped sharply thus facilitating the differentiation of peanut from the two other crops. This analysis led to the identification of data that have could be used to discriminate these crops (useful data). Classification of the combined useful data gave an overall high accuracy of 82%, with 96%, 61% and 65% for peanut, maize and millet, respectively. The non-agricultural areas (water, natural vegetation, habit, bare soil) were well classified with an accuracy greater than 90%.