TIMESAT Land cover class

Question

Is it possible to monitor phenology of only 2 land cover classes in TIMESAT? Example is corn and wheat for 7 years. Sowing structure of this crops changes every year, i.e. their location on an image is different every year, different pixels need to be monitored.

I would like to change monitored pixels for every year in order to track the phenology of corn and wheat from 2007 to 2014. Furthermore sowing structure consists of different parcels scattered on an image, approximately 50 MODIS pixels for every year.

I am using MODIS13Q1 product.

Answer 1

It is possible to monitor one or several classes in TIMESAT. The option to use several classes is mainly necessary if the phenological structure is very different between the classes, i.e. different parameter settings are necessary for the different classes. In your case it might be possible to use the same settings for both classes, but obviously this needs to be tested. If classes move around between years, and different TIMESAT parameters are necessary, then it will be necessary to set up separate TIMESAT runs for each year. This is not difficult but a bit tedious since TIMESAT requires three years of data for a successful run, with the year of interest in the center.

I suggest running TSM_GUI on separate pixels scattered across the image to see how well TIMESAT can fit to your data.