Assessment of a Markov logic model of crop rotations for early crop mapping

Detailed and timely information on crop area, production and yield is important for the assessment of environmental impacts of agriculture, for the monitoring of the land use and management practices, and for food security early warning systems. A machine learning approach is proposed to model crop rotations which can predict with good accuracy, at the beginning of the agricultural season, the crops most likely to be present in a given field using the crop sequence of the previous 3-5 years. The approach is able to learn from data and to integrate expert knowledge represented as first-order logic rules. Its accuracy is assessed using the French Land Parcel Information System implemented in the frame of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy. This assessment is done using different settings in terms of temporal depth and spatial generalization coverage. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is able to predict the crop type of each field, before the beginning of the crop season, with an accuracy as high as 60%, which is better than the results obtained with current approaches based on remote sensing imagery. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).