Crop Area Estimation in Iraq Based on Satellite Derived Phenological Metrics and the Influence of War and Drought

War and political conflicts can affect the land use practices, particularly agriculture in a country and in turn could affect the availability of food grain and food security of a country. Over last decade, Iraq had been involved in ‘Post-Gulf' war mainly to oppose the previous regime. Due to the political instability and fear for life during the war many farmers were unable to grown any crops, which affected the overall production of the country. In addition to the war, due to its geographical location, the region is affected by irregularities in precipitation resulting in frequent occurrence of drought. Both these factors made the region vulnerable to sustained food production.

However, at present there are no reliable estimation of both crop areas and crop yield across the country. Therefore, the current research will attempt to use the phonological information to classify the country's land cover type in order to provide an accurate estimation of crop area and their changes through time. Thirteen successive years of 8 days Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) with the spatial resolution of 250 m derived from the Moderate Resolution Imagery Spectrometer (MODIS) were analysed. Fourier technique will use to smooth the phonological signal. Eleven phenology metrics were extracted from MODIS NDVI time series with elevation from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) for Iraq to classify the crop areas. A decision tree based classifier was used to o discriminate crop types (irrigated and rainfed) to natural vegetation. Initial results suggested significant changes in crop area in Iraq from 2001 to 2013 mostly attributed to Post-Gulf war and occurrence of drought. A Detail quantitative estimate of the impact of these factors on total crop area and resulting crop yield will be presented.