Garlic Crops’ Mapping and Change Analysis in the Erhai Lake Basin Based on Google Earth Engine

Garlic (Allium sativum) is an important economic crop in China. In terms of using remote sensing technology to identify it, there is still room for improvement, and the high-precision classification of garlic has become an important issue. However, to the best of our knowledge, few studies have focused on garlic area mapping. Here, we propose a method for identifying garlic crops using samples and a multi-feature dataset under limited conditions. The results indicate the following: (1) In the land-use classification of the Erhai Lake Basin, the importance ranking of the characteristic bands, from high to low, is as follows: spectral features, vegetation features, texture features, and terrain features. (2) The random forest method based on feature selection demonstrates high accuracy in land-use classification within the Erhai Lake Basin in Yunnan Province. The overall classification accuracy reached 95.79%, with a Kappa coefficient of 0.95. (3) From 1999 to 2023, the expansion of garlic cultivation in the Erhai Lake Basin showed a trend of initially strengthening from north to south, which was followed by weakening. The vertical development of garlic cultivation reached saturation, showing a slow trend toward horizontal expansion between 2005 and 2018. The planting distributions in various townships in the Erhai Lake Basin gradually shifted from relatively uniform distributions to upstream development. This study utilized the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform and machine learning algorithms to compensate for the lack of statistical data on garlic cultivation in the Erhai Lake Basin. Moreover, it accurately, rapidly, and efficiently extracted planting information, demonstrating significant potential for practical applications.