Evaluation of Sentinel-2A Satellite Imagery for Mapping Cotton Root Rot

Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) is an economically important crop that is highly susceptible to cotton root rot. Remote sensing technology provides a useful and effective means for detecting and mapping cotton root rot infestations in cotton fields. This research assessed the potential of 10-m Sentinel-2A satellite imagery for cotton root rot detection and compared it with airborne multispectral imagery using unsupervised classification at both field and regional levels. Accuracy assessment showed that the classification maps from the Sentinel-2A imagery had an overall accuracy of 94.1% for field subset images and 91.2% for the whole image, compared with the airborne image classification results. However, some small cotton root rot areas were undetectable and some non-infested areas within large root rot areas were incorrectly classified as infested due to the images’ coarse spatial resolution. Classification maps based on field subset Sentinel-2A images missed 16.6% of the infested areas and the classification map based on the whole Sentinel-2A image for the study area omitted 19.7% of the infested areas. These results demonstrate that freely-available Sentinel-2 imagery can be used as an alternative data source for identifying cotton root rot and creating prescription maps for site-specific management of the disease.