The 10-m cotton maps in Xinjiang, China during 2018–2021

Abstract Cotton maps (10 m) of Xinjiang (XJ_COTTON10), which is the largest cotton production region of China, were produced from 2018 to 2021 through supervised classification. A two-step mapping strategy, i.e., cropland mapping followed by cotton extraction, was employed to improve the accuracy and efficiency of cotton mapping for a large region of about 1.66 million km2 with high heterogeneity. Additionally, the time-series satellite data related to spectral, textural, structural, and phenological features were combined and used in a supervised random forest classifier. The cotton/non-cotton classification model achieved overall accuracies of about 95% and 90% on the test samples of the same and adjacent years, respectively. The proposed two-step cotton mapping strategy proved promising and effective in producing multi-year and consistent cotton maps. XJ_COTTON10 agreed well with the statistical areas of cotton at the county level (R2 = 0.84–0.94). This is the first cotton mapping for the entire Xinjiang at 10-meter resolution, which can provide a basis for high-precision cotton monitoring and policymaking in China.