# Estimating Double Cropping Plantations in the Brazilian Cerrado through PlanetScope Monthly Mosaics
## 1 Introduction  
The Brazilian tropical savanna (Cerrado) covers an area surpassing 200 million ha in the central part of the country and is one of the richest biomes in the world in terms of biodiversity, includes more than 12,400 plant species that are endemic and has unique adaptation to the occurrences of fire, soils with low fertility and high acidity, and a six-month dry season [1]. It is considered as one of the world's hotspots for biodiversity conservation [2]. Roughly, half of this biome is covered by native vegetation [3], which corresponds to a mosaic of different species of grasses, shrubs, and trees in different proportions, depending on the soil texture, soil structure, soil moisture, and rainfall conditions, among other factors [4]. The Cerrado is also well-known for its highly mechanized large-scale production of food and energy [5]. In this biome, we find 47 million ha of cultivated pastures, mostly the African Brachiaria species, 23 million ha of annual crops, mainly soybean, maize, and cotton, and 500 thousand ha of perennial and semi-perennial crops, mostly coffee and sugarcane [6]. Pasturelands are spread throughout the entire biome while croplands are cultivated in more specific regions, that is, in agricultural frontiers with extensive flat terrains and rainfall levels typically higher than 1000 mm per year in the rainy season (from October to March) [1]. According to the Brazilian Native Vegetation Protection Law no. 12,651 of 25 May 2012, also known as the Brazilian Forest Code, farmers located in the Brazilian Cerrado must keep at least 20% of their rural properties with native vegetation or at least 35% if the property is located in the Amazon-Cerrado ecotone (Brazilian Legal Amazon) [7]. Furthermore, only 7.2% of the Cerrado is protected in terms of conservation units [1]. This soft environmental regulation reinforces the fact that both national and international conservation efforts tend to prioritize rainforests and to consider savanna ecosystems as land reserves for agricultural expansion [8; 9]. For example, the Amazon Soy Moratorium, proposed to reduce soybean expansion even in the Brazilian Amazon, effectively reduced the conversion of primary or secondary forests into soybean plantations in this region [10]. However, it caused a side effect in the Brazilian Cerrado, encouraging the opening of new agricultural areas, mainly in the new agricultural frontier known as MATOPIBA [11; 12]. At the same time, farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado are adopting different land management techniques to improve profitability and to reduce climatic risks (e.g., dry spell occurrences and low rainfall conditions in some years). Among different techniques, we can point out the use of the double cropping management system, which is becoming quite popular mainly in the consolidated agricultural frontiers in the Brazilian Cerrado [13; 14]. The double cropping system refers to crops that are planted twice in the same area and in the same crop growing season and has been adopted extensively not only in Brazil but also in other countries, especially China [15]. The harvested area of double-cropped maize in Brazil is now about four times higher than that from the single crop system: 16.4 million ha against 4.3 million ha in the 2021/2022 crop season, respectively [16]. Farms with the double cropping system can be identified accurately using in situ surveys. However, they are time consuming, labor intensive, and costly. Several authors have proposed different satellite data and procedures to monitor agricultural fields with double cropping systems since crop intensification is an essential information for land management and trade decisions. [PERSON] et al. [17] used an 8-day time series of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data sets processed by the Fast Fourier Transform to discriminate double cropping systems in Northern China, mainly winter wheat-maize and winter wheat-cotton plantations. [PERSON] et al. [18] and [PERSON] et al.