Rice Monitoring and Mapping in the Sylhet Region of Bangladesh

Bangladesh is one of the major rice producing countries in South Asia. The study area is Sylhet region of the north-eastern part of Bangladesh, which is one of the 6 administrative Divisions. This region is well known to be a flood prone. Quantification of rice area and yield estimation on a real time basis using conventional technique is a very tedious and erroneous task. Various models have been introduced to predict the crop yields before the harvest, but most of these models require field conditions data which are difficult to obtain for a vast region.

      In this project, a simple threshold technique with MODIS-NDVI time series data were was used to obtain cultivated area, cropping intensity and start of the season and cropping intensity. Start of the season maps were derived by tracing 60 to 70 days back from the day of the maximum NDVI. In addition, with nine years of historical maximum seasonal NDVI data and statistical data published by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) were used to build location specific yield forecasting models for Boro (January-June) and Aman (July-Dec) seasons using linear regression analysis.