The rice-crayfish field (i.e., RCF), a newly emerging rice cultivation pattern, has greatly expanded in China in the last decade due to its significant ecological and economic benefits. The spatial distribution of RCFs is an important dataset for crop planting pattern adjustment, water resource management and yield estimation. Here, an object- and topology-based analysis (OTBA) method, which considers spectral-spatial features and the topological relationship between paddy fields and their enclosed ditches, was proposed to identify RCFs. First, we employed an object-based method to extract crayfish breeding ditches using very high-resolution images. Subsequently, the paddy fields that provide fodder for crayfish were identified according to the topological relationship between the paddy field and circumjacent crayfish ditch. The extracted ditch objects together with those paddy fields were merged to derive the final RCFs. The performance of the OTBA method was carefully evaluated using the RCF and non-RCF samples. Moreover, the effects of different spatial resolutions, spectral bands and temporal information on RCF identification were comprehensively investigated. Our results suggest the OTBA method performed well in extracting RCFs, with an overall accuracy of 91.77%. Although the mapping accuracies decreased as the image spatial resolution decreased, satisfactory RCF mapping results (>80%) can be achieved at spatial resolutions greater than 2 m. Additionally, we demonstrated that the mapping accuracy can be improved by more than 10% when near-infrared (NIR) band information was involved, indicating the necessity of the NIR band when selecting images to derive reliable RCF maps. Furthermore, the images acquired in the rice growth phase are recommended to maximize the differences of spectral characteristics between paddy fields and ditches. These promising findings suggest that the OTBA approach performs well for mapping RCFs in areas with fragmented agricultural landscapes, which provides fundamental information for further agricultural land use and water resources management.

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13224666