Agriculture Velocity of Winter Wheat in Ukraine

Recent research on the impact of climate change on agriculture indicates substantial potential for changes in winter wheat production due to temperature regime changes in the coming decades [1]. However, this effect and its subsequent impact on agriculture sustainability and food security is not globally uniform, resulting in significant re-distribution of crop types dependent on latitude. This crop migration can be quantified with the use of a novel and fundamental variable, agricultural velocity. This coefficient is estimated as a proportion between temporal and spatial changes in cropland intensification for a multi-year time period based on crop classification maps. This formulation provides the possibility to represent intensification changes of agriculture in the form of species migration comparable with climate velocity models in estimating future assessments of wildlife vulnerability [2]. In this work we demonstrate the results of winter wheat agricultural velocity estimations for Ukraine based on MODIS derived winter wheat classification maps between the years 2001 and 2020. To accomplish this with crop maps, we use a computer vision technique called Optical Flow [3] that has wide use in the tasks of remote sensing imagery registration. This analysis produces results that indicate significant correlation between climate and agriculture velocity when compared against changing latitudes and thus reflects migration of winter wheat from higher to lower temperatures, as a response to shifting a climate regime.

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Le Besnerais, Guy, and Frédéric Champagnat. "Dense optical flow by iterative local window registration." IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2005. Vol. 1. IEEE, 2005.