Integrating Early Growth Information to Monitor Winter Wheat Powdery Mildew Using Multi-Temporal Landsat-8 Imagery

Powdery mildew is one of the dominant diseases in winter wheat. The accurate monitoring of powdery mildew is important for crop management and production. Satellite-based remote sensing monitoring has been proven as an efficient tool for regional disease detection and monitoring. However, the information provided by single-date satellite scene is hard to achieve acceptable accuracy for powdery mildew disease, and incorporation of early period contextual information of winter wheat can improve this situation. In this study, a multi-temporal satellite data based powdery mildew detecting approach had been developed for regional disease mapping. Firstly, the Lansat-8 scenes that covered six winter wheat growth periods (expressed in chronological order as periods 1 to 6) were collected to calculate typical vegetation indices (VIs), which include disease water stress index (DSWI), optimized soil adjusted vegetation index (OSAVI), shortwave infrared water stress index (SIWSI), and triangular vegetation index (TVI). A multi-temporal VIs-based k-nearest neighbors (KNN) approach was then developed to produce the regional disease distribution. Meanwhile, a backward stepwise elimination method was used to confirm the optimal multi-temporal combination for KNN monitoring model. A classification and regression tree (CART) and back propagation neural networks (BPNN) approaches were used for comparison and validation of initial results. VIs of all periods except 1 and 3 provided the best multi-temporal data set for winter wheat powdery mildew monitoring. Compared with the traditional single-date (period 6) image, the multi-temporal images based KNN approach provided more disease information during the disease development, and had an accuracy of 84.6%. Meanwhile, the accuracy of the proposed approach had 11.5% and 3.8% higher than the multi-temporal images-based CART and BPNN models’, respectively. These results suggest that the use of satellite images for early critical disease infection periods is essential for improving the accuracy of monitoring models. Additionally, satellite imagery also assists in monitoring powdery mildew in late wheat growth periods.