Iranian Journal of Irrigation & Drainage

Iranian Journal of Irrigation & Drainage

Intelligent Monitoring of Rainfed and Irrigated Wheat Cultivation in the Marun–Jarahi Basin Using Sentinel Data and the Random Forest Model

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Masoud Soltani 1
Bahareh Bahmanabadi 1
Ali Mokhtaran 2
1 Department of Water Science and Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran
2 Assisstant Professor, Agricultural Engineering Research Institue (AERI) Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO); Karaj; Iran
10.22034/idj.2026.577267.2673
Abstract
Wheat is one of the most strategic crops for food security and occupies a large proportion of agricultural lands in Iran. However, climate change, increasing water scarcity, and the limitations of traditional field-based statistics have made accurate monitoring of wheat cultivated areas a challenging task. In this study, an integrated framework based on multi-source remote sensing data and a machine learning approach was developed to identify rainfed and irrigated wheat fields and to estimate their cultivated area in the Maroon watershed in southwest Iran. A set of spectral, radar, and thermal features representing the biophysical, structural, and water-related characteristics of wheat was extracted and used as input variables for the model. The Random Forest algorithm was selected due to its robustness against overfitting and its ability to handle heterogeneous and non-linear data. Model performance was evaluated using a confusion matrix, overall accuracy, and the kappa coefficient. The results demonstrated a high classification performance, with an overall accuracy of approximately 97% and a kappa coefficient of about 0.96 for the test dataset. In addition, the estimated wheat cultivated area showed a low bias of around 3%, indicating a high level of reliability in distinguishing between rainfed and irrigated wheat fields.
Keywords
wheat
ESA WorldCover
LGRIP30
Dynamic World
Iranian Journal of Irrigation & Drainage
Volume 20, Issue 3 - Serial Number 118
September and October 2026
Pages 431-447