SAR & Optical Data for Early-Season Crop-Livestock Mapping with ML

The study explored the potential of three machine and deep learning algorithms (random forest, long short-term memory, and transformer) to perform early-season (with three-time windows) mapping of ICLS fields. To explore the scalability of the proposed methods, researchers tested them in two regions with different latitudes, cloud cover rates, field sizes, landscapes, and crop types. Finally, the potential of SAR (Sentinel-1) and optical (Sentinel-2) data was tested.