Monitoring Crop Growth During the Period of the Rapid Spread of COVID-19 in China by Remote Sensing

Yan Wang; Dailiang Peng; Le Yu; Yaqiong Zhang; Jie Yin; Leilei Zhou; Shijun Zheng; Fumin Wang; Cunjun Li

doi:10.1109/JSTARS.2020.3029434

Monitoring Crop Growth During the Period of the Rapid Spread of COVID-19 in China by Remote Sensing

IEEE J Sel Top Appl Earth Obs Remote Sens. 2020 Oct 7:13:6195-6205. doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2020.3029434. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Yan Wang¹, Dailiang Peng¹, Le Yu², Yaqiong Zhang³, Jie Yin⁴, Leilei Zhou⁴, Shijun Zheng¹, Fumin Wang⁵, Cunjun Li⁶

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research InstituteChinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100094 China.
² Department of Earth System ScienceTsinghua University Beijing 100084 China.
³ Center for Satellite Application on Ecology and EnvironmentMinistry of Ecology and Environment Beijing 100006 China.
⁴ School of Surveying and Land Information EngineeringHenan Polytechnic University Jiaozuo 454003 China.
⁵ Institute of Remote Sensing and Information Technology ApplicationZhejiang University Hangzhou 310058 China.
⁶ Beijing Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture Beijing 100097 China.

Abstract

The status of crop growth under the influence of COVID-19 is an important information for evaluating the current food security in China. This article used the cloud computing platform of Google Earth Engine, to access and analyze Sentinel-2, MODIS, and other multisource remote sensing data in the last five years to monitor the growth of crops in China, especially in Hubei province, during the period of the rapid spread of COVID-19 (i.e., from late January to mid-March 2020), and compared with the growth over the same period under similar climate conditions in the past four years. We further analyzed the indirect effects of COVID-19 on crop growth. The results showed that: the area of the crops with better growth (51%) was much more than that with worse growth (22%); the crops with better and worse growth were mainly distributed in the North China Plain (the main planting areas of winter wheat in China) and the South China regions (such as Guangxi, Guangdong province), respectively. The area of the crops with a similar growth occupied 27%. In Hubei province, the area of the crops with better growth (61%) was also more than that with worse growth (27%). It was found that there was no obvious effect from COVID-19 on the overall growth of crops in China during the period from late January to mid-March 2020 and the growth of crops was much better than that during the same period in previous years. The findings in this study are helpful in evaluating the impact of the COVID-19 on China's agriculture, which are conducive to serve the relevant agricultural policy formulation and to ensure food security.

Keywords: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19); crop growth; remote sensing.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 42030111 and in part by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant XDA19090112.