Conservation agriculture (CA) champions the sustainable use of land to elevate agricultural productivity and bolster environmental health. Central to CA practices, crop residues yield extensive benefits to both the ecosystem and farming systems by enhancing soil protection, conserving moisture, and facilitating nutrient cycling. The contributions highlight the necessity for spatial and temporal information to assess crop residue cover (CRC). The daily availability of 3 m resolution observations from the PlanetScope constellation facilitates the mapping of small CRC areas, which remain undetectable at coarser spatial resolutions. Nonetheless, the application of the PlanetScope sensors for crop residue detection encounters challenges due to the absence of shortwave infrared (SWIR) bands. The bands are critical for identifying CRC in agricultural fields. To overcome the limitation, the study introduced a novel Normalized Difference Crop Residue Index (NDCRI), which innovatively employed visible, red-edge, and near-infrared (NIR) bands of PlanetScope imagery to quantify field-level CRC fractions, marking a pioneering use of the satellites in CRC assessment. Conducted in the study area, located within the Urtachirchik District of Tashkent Province, Uzbekistan, a country characterized by its arid environment —the research validated NDCRI's efficacy through comparison with field measurements, achieving goodness of fit (R2) of 0.693 and root mean squared error (RMSE) of 19.15. The index's performance, verified through various regression analyses demonstrating its capability to estimate CRC, was also confirmed at different times across the research field and the district. During data processing, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was used as a filtering criterion (NDVI < 0.22) to mitigate the impact of vegetation on the efficiency of the newly developed index. Furthermore, in response to local conditions and needs, the research initiated an original concept to CRC policy, encompassing the strategic addition of crop residues from other fields to the study site.
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