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• Near infrared band (sentinel-2) and SATVI are of great importance in predicting SOC. • Adding phenological parameters improved SOC prediction accuracy. • Crop phenological parameters were generated based on sentinel-2 images. • Contrast the effects of moisture index, bright-related index and vegetation index in SOC mapping. It is important to predict the spatial distribution of SOC accurately for migrating carbon emission and sustainable soil management. Environmental variables influence the accuracy of SOC prediction with digital soil mapping (DSM) approaches. In addition to the commonly-used natural predictors, remote sensing variables have been recently used in DSM. However, it is still challenging which variables are effective to predict SOC in farmland. Although phenological parameters have been recently used to indicate human activities that affect SOC in farmland, there are few studies that employ the phenological parameters in SOC prediction. Therefore, this study investigates the feasibility of SOC prediction with the phenological parameters and numerous remote sensing variables extracted from Sentinel-2 at high temporal and spatial resolutions. From 34 Sentinel-2 time series images from 2018 to 2019, 17 phenological parameters were extracted for Xuanzhou, Anhui Province using a dynamic threshold method. Furthermore, fifteen remote sensing predictors comprised of vegetation indices, bright-related indices, and moisture indices were generated from the Sentinel-2 images. The phenological parameters and remote sensing variables were combined with natural variables to predict SOC contents at the surface soil layer using random forest. The results showed that the auxiliary parameters, i.e., the phenological parameters and remote sensing predictors, enhanced the predictability of SOC with an increase in R2 by 171% and a decrease in RMSE by 14%. This study also identified relatively more important auxiliary parameters for the SOC prediction: the largest data value for the fitted function during the season (a6), rate of increase at the beginning of the season (a8), large seasonal integral (a10), SATVI, and Band8. Therefore, this study verified that the phenological parameters and remote sensing predictors extracted from the Sentinel-2 EVI time series are effective for DSM in farmland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The feasibility of adding multi-temporal radar Sentinel-1A data to SOC prediction was explored. • Climate variables contributed the most to explaining SOC content variation. • In this ecosystem, RF and BRT models showed similar performance and produced similar SOC spatial distribution patterns. Soil organic carbon (SOC) has a large impact on soil quality and global climate change. It is therefore important to be able to predict SOC accurately to promote sustainable soil management. Although the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has many advantages and has been widely used in soil science research, it has rarely been used in previous SOC mapping studies based on remote sensing images. The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of multi-temporal Sentinel-1A data in SOC prediction, by comparing the predictive performance of random forest (RF) and boosted regression tree (BRT) models in the Heihe River Basin in northwestern China. A set of 162 topsoil (0–20 cm) samples were taken and 15 environmental variables were obtained including land use, topography, climate, and remote sensing images (optical and SAR data). Using a cross-validation procedure to evaluate the performance of the models, three statistical indices were calculated. Overall, both RF and BRT models effectively predicted SOC content, exhibiting similar performance and producing similar spatial distribution patterns of SOC. The results showed that the addition of multi-temporal Sentinel-1A images improved prediction accuracy, with the root mean squared error (RMSE), the mean absolute error (MAE) and the coefficient of determination (R2) improving by 9.0%, 8.3% and 13.5%, respectively. Furthermore, the combination of all environmental variables had the best prediction performance explaining 75% of SOC variation. The most important environmental variables explaining SOC variation were precipitation, elevation, and temperature. The multi-temporal Sentinel-1A data in RF and BRT models explained 9% and 7%, respectively. The results from our case study highlight the usefulness of multi-temporal Sentinel-1 data in SOC mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]