mapping and acreage estimating of rice agricultural land using radarsat a satellite images

policy making and planning for agricultural development and conditional improvement of rural and farmers requires accurate and real time information and statistics. in iran, accessing relevant agriculture statistics is mainly gained through expert knowledge and traditional methods. studies show that these have a high percent of error. this research has been aimed so to, by using new methods including radarsat data and remote sensing techniques, meet agricultural statistics and information with minimum error. using data integration in geographic information system, not only leads to the results with high accuracy, but also it will be possible to input, save, retrieve, and analyze complex data for modeling different resources activities. in this research, radarsat data acquired in 1998 and tm landsat images used to map and estimate paddy rice agricultural lands in sari suburb. after geo-referencing of data, different image processing techniques such as data classification based of mlc have been used. results show that statistics generated from remote sensing techniques are much more accurate than those reported from traditional methods.