Remote sensing and agricultural statistics: Crop area estimation in north-eastern Spain through diachronic Landsat TM and ground sample data

Landsat Thematic Maper (TM) imagery was used to estimate crop area using the regression method. Two different kind of estimates have been made; one using a Landsat TM image of the same year as the ground sample and the other using an image taken the year before. The results show that if the rate of land cover change is not great the use of an image of the year previous to the ground survey is a way of reducing the costs of the images acquisition without a great loss in the accuracy of the area estimation of the main crops compared to the conventional regression method.