EARice10: A 10 m Resolution Annual Rice Distribution Map of East Asia for 2023

Abstract. Timely and accurate high-resolution annual mapping of rice distribution is essential for food security, greenhouse gas emissions assessment and supporting for sustainable development goals. East Asia (EA), a major global rice-producing region, accounts for approximately 29.3 % of the world's rice production. Therefore, to acquire the latest rice distribution of the EA, this study proposed a novel rice distribution mapping method based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, producing a 10-meter-resolution annual rice distribution map (EARice10) of EA for 2023. A new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)-based Rice distribution Mapping Index (SRMI) was firstly proposed and combined with optical indices to generate representative rice samples. In addition, a stacking-based optical-SAR adaptive fusion model was designed to fully integrate the features of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data for high-precision rice mapping in EA. The accuracy of EARice10 was evaluated using more than 90,000 validation samples and achieved an overall accuracy of 90.48 %, with both user’s and producer’s accuracies exceeding 90 %. The reliability of the product was verified by an R² values ranging between 0.94 and 0.98 with respect to official statistics, and between 0.79 and 0.98 with respect to previous rice mapping products. EARice10 is accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13118409 (Song et al., 2024).