CROP MAPPING APPLICATIONS AT SCALE: USING GOOGLE EARTH ENGINE TO ENABLE

GLOBAL CROP AREA AND STATUS MONITORING USING FREE AND OPEN DATA SOURCES

Guido Lemoine and Olivier Léo

European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Ispra, Italy

ABSTRACT VEGETATION or PROBA-V.

The confluence of rapidly growing streams of “free and
open” satellite imagery at 10-30 m spatial resolution,
expending libraries of sophisticated open source software
components for geospatial data processing and the increase
in publicly available open data sets is driving major changes
in agricultural monitoring activities. In the next years, we
can expect a scale step in derived crop area and status
information at parcel level from the combined use of global
sensors such as Landsat-8, Sentinel 1 and 2. In order to
handle the unprecedented flow of such data into value
adding agricultural mapping and monitoring applications,
novel approaches need to be developed to ensure a globally
consistent use in a “knowledge inference” context in support
of, for instance, food security analysis. We demonstrate the
use of Google Earth Engine (GEE) as a prototype
environment that could possibly support such a context with
3 different examples.
Index Terms— open data, Sentinel-1, Landsat-8,
Google Earth Engine
1. INTRODUCTION
The growing availability of “free and open” satellite imagery
at 10-30 m spatial resolution is a boon for agricultural
mapping and monitoring applications aimed at deriving wide
area and whole-season crop production information.
Whereas access to US Landsat imagery has been “freed and
opened” already since 2010, the introduction of Landsat-8 in
early 2013 is recognised as a significant step-up, mostly due
to quality issues with Landsat-7 and limited actuality of
previous Landsat sensors. The European Copernicus
program [1] has introduced a C-band SAR in the “free and
open” domain with the launch of Sentinel-1 in April 2014
and operational imagery provision since early October 2014.
On June 12, 2015 Sentinel-2 will launch with a wide swath,
11-band optical and infrared sensor. Sentinel 1 and 2 sensors
produce imagery in the 10-60 m resolution range.
Combined, the Landsat and Sentinel sensors will provide a
capacity to monitor agricultural production at parcel level,
rather than at aggregated mixed spectral resolution of low
(100-300 m) resolution sensors like MODIS, SPOT-
The Copernicus programme foresees simultaneous operation
of dual sensors with interleaved 12-day revisit frequency
(i.e. < 6 days site revisit) from 2016 onwards, for the next 15
years. Thus, methodologies that rely on consistent inter-
annual comparison of time series can now consider the high
resolution domain, leading to a dramatic scale up of the
detail of the inferred agronomic information (e.g. crop area,
biophysical parameters, anomaly detection, etc.).
The introduction of “free and open” satellite coincides with
the increased public release of ever more detailed ancillary
data sets that are required to produce appropriately
georeferenced and robust indicators and their spatial and
temporal statistics. Furthermore, these data layers are
becoming essential for creating added value information for
specific agronomic applications (e.g. support to farm
management, logistics and trade, environmental impact
assessment).
A third phenomenon that contributes to potential wide-
spread take up of “free and open” data flows is the release of
relevant processing algorithms for both image analysis and
geospatial integration in the open source domain. It is
relatively straightforward nowadays to compose highly
automated workflow for post-processing, data analytics and
reporting purposes with open source components. This
includes the possibility to scale to very significant data flow
(e.g. several Gb/day) with parallel processing solutions or
hardware-specific modules (e.g. using GPUs [2]) on cheap
commodity platforms. Example solutions exist that can
handle data flows and analysis tasks at the size of a country
[3], a large region or specific agricultural production areas.
However, in our work at the JRC, we are typically interested
in wide area regional and continental applications, e.g. for
the monitoring of European agriculture, large arable crop
areas outside Europe and, in the context of our support to
food security, agricultural area and crop conditions in crisis
areas. Thus, our interest is directed towards scalable
solutions that provide access to global data sets and the
computing infrastructure to rapidly generate crop area and
crop status indicators, both on a continuous and ad-hoc
request basis.

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 Figure 1. Summer crop decrease (in green colours) and increase (in pink colours) in Ukraine in 2014 compared to
2013 using thresholded Landsat-8 NDVI composites from the period July 10-August 31, and aggregated to
Ukrainian rajon administrative boundaries. The maximum decrease (darkest green) is 113299 ha, the maximum
increase (darkest pink) is 65856 ha. All analysis is performed within the JavaScript API of Google Earth Engine.

2. METHODOLOGY shared code simply re-runs to generate the result.

In this paper, we focus on the use of “closely-coupled”
parallel processing approached which is of increasing
interest in global Earth Observation (EO) applications. With
“close-coupled” we mean data processing and analytics
solutions where scalable processing capacity is logically co-
located with access to complete image and data archives.
Although we use Google Earth Engine (GEE, [4]) as an
example, more generic “cloud computing” providers are
increasingly looking into solutions that address specific
needs of EO users.
Our (current) preference for GEE is based on the relative
maturity of accessible functionality through simple
application programming interfaces (API). We use both the
JavaScript and Python API. Both APIs effectively hide the
complexity of parallel computing and large data storage
access and permit the user to focus on the logic of data
selection and programmable workflow. For this, a large set
of callable functions are provided in the GEE algorithm
library. The, expanding, library combines many of the
standard image processing routines (filters, band math,
feature detection, etc.) with specific data access,
composition (e.g. ImageCollections) and reduction routines,
seamlessly integrating geospatial features
(FeatureCollections) as well. It is important to note that most
of the processing libraries in GEE are similar to existing
open source components, such as OpenCV, GDAL, PyTable,
etc. The Python API facilitates further integration with post-
processing, analytics and visualisation components. One of
the most appreciated aspects of GEE is the way analysis
results can be shared as scripts or code, rather than through
the exchange of bulky downloads. The recipient of the
Applications of GEE code anywhere on the globe are then
only limited by the availability of the appropriate data.
3. RESULTS
In this section, we demonstrate 3 use cases for which we
illustrate some aspects of GEE that address [future]
application needs in agricultural monitoring needs. We do
not make a direct comparison to existing methods using low
resolution data, as this is not always sensible (e.g. crop
classification). To appreciate processing speed in GEE, we
can only present run-times that are equivalent to the time the
user is waiting for the result to be rendered. In GEE, there is
(currently) no way for users to know the exact CPU (or
GPU) run-time used. Rendering delays for either of the cases
are never above the order of 1 minute. They may actually
fluctuate depending on the overall user load of GEE).
In the first case, we try to estimate differences in crop area
of summer cultivations in Ukraine between 2013 and 2014.
For this, we select all available Landsat-8 data in the period
July 10 – August 31 for the entire territory of Ukraine,
masked for crop land pixels in the 2000 GlobCover land use
classification. We then generate the NDVI from top-of-
atmosphere reflectance and compose a single image as a
maximum-composite from the NDVI values. For both years,
we choose NDVI = 0.2 as a threshold, under which a pixel is
considered to belong to a bare soil, i.e. cannot be
representative of a summer crop. Finally, we aggregate the
sum of all pixel values that are above the threshold at 30 m
resolution for all administrative boundaries at Ukrainian
rajon (district) level. The latter has been extracted from
OpenStreetMap (www.openstreetmap.org). The result can be

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 Table 1. Confusion matrix for all large set of 2013 reference parcels (> 6 ha) from the Zeeland province, the
Netherlands using the RifleSerialClassifier of Google Earth Engine on a Landsat-8 scene of 12 July 2013. Random
training samples, classification results and confusion matrix are generated with the Python API of GEE.

ALF FRU GRA GRS MAI ONI POT SBT SWH VEG WWH rowtotals user accuracy

ALF 33 0 7 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 42 0.79
FRU 0 83 7 0 13 0 0 0 0 1 0 104 0.80

GRA 7 24 405 16 40 3 8 2 5 18 2 530 0.76

GRS 0 0 14 210 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 226 0.93

MAI 11 4 2 0 150 0 5 1 1 30 1 205 0.73

ONI 0 1 1 1 0 266 4 2 2 7 3 287 0.93

POT 27 0 30 29 6 4 841 5 0 47 1 990 0.85
SBT 1 0 1 6 2 3 6 446 1 6 6 478 0.93

SWH 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 37 0 12 49 0.76

VEG 5 2 1 0 10 6 3 1 0 59 0 87 0.68
WWH 0 0 2 11 1 7 8 2 157 3 1239 1430 0.87
columntotals 84 114 470 273 222 289 877 459 203 173 1264 4428 OA = 0.85

producer accuracy 0.39 0.73 0.86 0.77 0.68 0.92 0.96 0.97 0.18 0.34 0.98 κ = 0.82

mapped (Fig. 1) or presented in tabular format. We find a
distinct geo-spatial pattern with large differences in the
South-Eastern and Eastern districts, which can be related to
differences in agro-meteorological conditions and the
ongoing conflict in the area (e.g. the Crimea peninsula).
Our second example is an implementation of image
classification in GEE, which we apply on a Landsat-8
imagery of July 12, 2013 for the south-western Netherlands
province of Zeeland. In the Netherlands, as in other EU
member states, farmers declare crop cultivation on an annual
basis to apply for support under the EU's Common
Agricultural Policy. The Netherlands has released the
(anonymized) information in public domain since 2009
(www.pdok.nl) as annual sets of approximately 770,000
parcel boundaries with crop code. This turns out to be a
rather unique data set for large scale experimentation with
image classification. In our example, we test GEE classifiers
for 5% random selections of training parcels that we draw
from the set of approximately 35,000 parcels in Zeeland.
The remainder of the set is then used to verify the classifier
majority result in a classical confusion matrix (Table 1). In
the example, we limit field size to > 6 ha and for crop
classes that have, at least, 40 parcels in the selection. Even
though the timing of the Landsat-8 image is not optimal for
the delineation of specific crop types (in particular grass,
maize), the overall accuracy of 0.85 is already quite
impressive. This approach is easily extendable to include
other image combinations (e.g. multi-temporal sets,
combinations of SAR and optical, etc.).
The last case is a test in crop delineation in central New
South Wales (NSW, Australia, centered around (lat, lon) =
(146.03, -34.81)) using a combination of 9 Sentinel-1A (S1)
dual polarization (VV/VH) interferometric wide mode
ground range detected (GRD) images, including ascending
and descending frames, and 4 Landsat-8 (L8) data sets for
the period September 29 – December 12, 2014. Since
Sentinel-1A is only operational since October 2014, crop
delineation in the Northern Hemisphere is not yet fully
feasible, because imagery does not yet cover the critical part
of the growing season. In the example, we use GEE to
automatically select a random sample of points within a
delineated arable crop production area. The points are
filtered on a thresholded standard deviation divided by the
mean for a local circular kernel of 60 m radius. In this way,
only “pure” radiometric samples are retained which typically
pertain to individual crop parcels or homogenous
background land use cases (see Fig. 2). The time series of
SAR calibrated backscattering coefficients and L8 surface
reflectance values for each filtered point, and their local
statistics, are extracted from GEE into Python geopandas
data structures for further cluster analysis and classification.
Clusters can be labelled based on inferred radiometric
signatures, which is still at an experimental stage. In
particular, the L8 NDVI temporal composites are very useful
to stratify the cluster analysis into broad crop classes, such
as winter and early and late summer crop types. Within these

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 Figure 2. Multi-temporal composite of Sentinel-1A IW GRD VH images (9 Oct, 14 Nov, 8 Dec 2014, left) and
Landsat-8 NDVI (30 Sep, 1 Nov, 11 Dec 2014, right) prepared in Google Earth Engine. Sentinel imagery integrated
via Google Map Engine. Derived statistics are used to infer crop classes.
clusters, further refinement is than based on SAR signatures,
which separate classes on the basis of their surface
preparation (differences in surface roughness) and
vegetation cover. Especially the cross-polarized (VH)
backscattering coefficients are useful in this respect. We also
pick up significant rain events in the SAR signatures (drastic
soil moisture change).
4. CONCLUSIONS
We have presented an approach demonstrating the use of
GEE in rapid prototyping and testing of crop mapping and
monitoring applications which have the potential to scale up
global activities in this domain to the 10-30 m resolution
range. This is likely to have a crucial impact on our capacity
to enumerate crop production statistics that are relevant in
our food security monitoring work. We believe this
development addresses a number of crucial requirements
that are defined in [5]. Although we have focused on the use
of GEE, other computing configurations, e.g. based on
collaborative networks of local workstations, can be
expected to be equally able to address the data handling and
processing needs to scale up. Both environments will take
huge benefit from rapidly developing open source software
solutions and should aim at maximising open access to
results in order to establish an evolutionary knowledge base
which will help grow the user base through sharing of
expertise and inferred information, stimulate optimised co-
variable collection and integration of analysis techniques to
provide a basis for long term monitoring of global
agricultural production.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The results presented in this paper are, partly or wholly,
generated with the use of Google Earth Engine under a
trusted tester agreement between the authors’ organization
and Google.
6. REFERENCES
[1] European Commission, The European Earth
Observation Programme Copernicus,
http://www.copernicus.eu/pages-
principales/infrastructure/sentinels/
[2] G. Lemoine, and M. Giovalli, “Geo-Correction of High-
Resolution Imagery Using Fast Template Matching on a
GPU in Emergency Mapping Contexts”. Remote Sens.,
Vol 5, 4488-4502, 2013.
[3] P. van der Voet, C. Bielski and E. van Valkengoed, “Fast
Processing Workflow to Provide High Resolutin
Sentinel-like Data Extracts at Parcel Level, Proc.
Sentinel-2 2014 Workshop, ESA-ESRIN, Frascati, Italy,
20-22 May 2014.
[4] Google Inc., “Earth Engine Documentation”,
https://sites.google.com/site/earthengineapidocs/
[5] C. Atzberger, “Advances in Remote Sensing of
Agriculture: Context Description, Existing Operational
Monitoring Systems and Major Information Needs.”
Remote Sens, Vol 5, 949-981, 2013.

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