Downscaling Landsat 7 canopy reflectance employing a multi-soil sensor platform

Crop growth and yield can be efficiently monitored using canopy reflectance. However, the spatial resolution of freely available remote sensing data is too coarse to fully understand the spatial dynamics of crop status. The objective of this study was to downscale Landsat 7 (L7) reflectance from the native resolution of 30 × 30 m to that typical of yield maps (ca. 5 × 5 m) over two fields in northeastern Colorado, USA. The fields were cultivated with winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in the 2002–2003 growing season. Geospatial yield measurements were available (1 per ca. 20 m²). Geophysical (apparent soil electrical conductivity and bare-soil imagery) and terrain (micro-elevation) data were acquired (resolution