Rice monitoring in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam

Vietnam is one of the world's largest rice exporting countries since the mid-1990s and the fifth producer country in the world of the global production. Of which, the fertile Mekong Delta at the southern tip of Vietnam accounts for more than half of the rice production. In addition, the Vietnamese are among the world top five rice consumers. This makes the rice growing areas of the Mekong Delta a good test region to assess the rice monitoring system using remote sensing techniques. However, the country located in the tropics, it is often clouded to affect the image quality obtained from optical remote sensors. Radar remote sensing overcomes this drawback and can acquire images at any time of year. The paper presents research results of rice monitoring using various kinds of SAR data acquired at different years, i.e. ERS2-SAR (1997), ENVISAT-ASAR (2007) and TerraSAR-X (2010-2011) in An Giang, Can Tho and Soc Trang provinces of the Mekong Delta, which has a very complex cropping system (single, double, and even triple rice crops per year). The yield predictive model based on multiple regression analysis was proposed and attained good results, and thus proved to be a potential tool for monitoring rice crops in the study area