A Case Study of Rice Paddy Field Detection Using Sentinel-1 Time Series in Northern Italy

Whereas a vast literature exists reporting on mapping of rice paddy fields in Asia based on spaceborne data, especially from radar sensors, comparatively little has been done so far on the European context, where production is much smaller in absolute terms. From a scientific standpoint, it would be interesting to characterize rice paddy fields in terms of typical annual trend of radar response in a context where seasons follow different patterns with respect to the Asian one. In this manuscript we report a case study on a designated set of rice paddy fields in northern Italy, where the largest fraction of European rice paddy fields are located. Building on previous work, more in-depth analysis of the time trends of radar response is carried out, and some preliminary conclusions on features usable in mapping are presented.