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Alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.), referred to as the “Queen of Forages” because of its importance among forage crops, provides high quality forage for the livestock industry. The timing and frequency of alfalfa hay harvesting have implications on its quality and quantity. With ever-increasing capability, it is possible to use satellite remote sensing data to monitor alfalfa harvests. This study investigated the potential of using satellite remote sensing to capture frequent harvesting events on an alfalfa field in central Oklahoma. Both passive remote sensing data, namely Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Landsat-7 and -8, Sentinel-2, Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS), and active remote sensing data, namely Sentinel-1, were included. Our results indicate that good quality optical remote sensing datasets (i.e., cloud and cloud shadow free) with both fine spatial (≤100 m) and high temporal (effective observation at 8-day intervals or better) resolutions are necessary to detect frequent alfalfa harvesting events, challenged by possible adverse weather conditions and quick regrowth of vegetation after harvest. Landsat (7 and 8) and Sentinel-2 were more sensitive to changes in vegetation indices after harvest than MODIS due to their higher spatial resolutions, which helped avoid the mixed pixel issue in MODIS caused by its coarser spatial resolution (∼500 m). Combining Landsat (7 and 8) with Sentinel-2 imageries through linear regression between the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values, up to one week apart, increased the accuracy of detecting frequent alfalfa harvesting events. The responses of HLS to alfalfa harvesting events were similar with fused Landsat and Sentinel-2 data using their linear relationship of NDVI values. However, the high noise level in the HLS data needs to be minimized before it can be used to detect alfalfa harvests at the regional scale. In most cases, both Sentinel-1 radar backscatter coefficients (vertical transmit and vertical receive, VV + vertical transmit and horizontal receive, VH) and interferometric coherence from Sentinel-1 Simple Look Complex (SLC) data were decreased by harvesting events in small incident angle observations (34.31°). No consistent relationships existed between backscatter or coherence and alfalfa harvests in larger incident angle observations (45.11°). Future studies should focus on small incident angle observations instead of processing all of the radar data, which has big data volume and is time-consuming. Overall, active radar has the potential to detect alfalfa harvesting events. However, it is visually less intuitive than optical data with incident angles, quantity harvested, and soil moisture being the compounding factors. This study illustrates that combining multiple optical sensors with a fine spatial resolution (e.g., Landsat-7, 8, and Sentinel-2) and/or fusing radar with optical remote sensing to increase the temporal resolution are promising approaches to detect frequent alfalfa harvesting events and other hay harvesting activities. |
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