scholarly journals Ecosystem Drought Response Timescales from Thermal Emission versus Shortwave Remote Sensing

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Andujar ◽  
Nir Y. Krakauer ◽  
Chuixiang Yi ◽  
Felix Kogan

Remote sensing is used for monitoring the impacts of meteorological drought on ecosystems, but few large-scale comparisons of the response timescale to drought of different vegetation remote sensing products are available. We correlated vegetation health products derived from polar-orbiting radiometer observations with a meteorological drought indicator available at different aggregation timescales, the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), to evaluate responses averaged globally and over latitude and biome. The remote sensing products are Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), which uses normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to identify plant stress, Temperature Condition Index (TCI), based on thermal emission as a measure of surface temperature, and Vegetation Health Index (VHI), the average of VCI and TCI. Globally, TCI correlated best with 2-month timescale SPEI, VCI correlated best with longer timescale droughts (peak mean correlation at 13 months), and VHI correlated best at an intermediate timescale of 4 months. Our results suggest that thermal emission (TCI) may better detect incipient drought than vegetation color (VCI). VHI had the highest correlations with SPEI at aggregation times greater than 3 months and hence may be the most suitable product for monitoring the effects of long droughts.

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (7) ◽  
pp. 2102
Author(s):  
Elmar Ritz ◽  
Jarle W. Bjerke ◽  
Hans Tømmervik

In this study, we focused on three species that have proven to be vulnerable to winter stress: Empetrum nigrum, Vaccinium vitis-idaea and Hylocomium splendens. Our objective was to determine plant traits suitable for monitoring plant stress as well as trait shifts during spring. To this end, we used a combination of active and passive handheld normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) sensors, RGB indices derived from ordinary cameras, an optical chlorophyll and flavonol sensor (Dualex), and common plant traits that are sensitive to winter stress, i.e. height, specific leaf area (SLA). Our results indicate that NDVI is a good predictor for plant stress, as it correlates well with height (r = 0.70, p < 0.001) and chlorophyll content (r = 0.63, p < 0.001). NDVI is also related to soil depth (r = 0.45, p < 0.001) as well as to plant stress levels based on observations in the field (r = −0.60, p < 0.001). Flavonol content and SLA remained relatively stable during spring. Our results confirm a multi-method approach using NDVI data from the Sentinel-2 satellite and active near-remote sensing devices to determine the contribution of understory vegetation to the total ecosystem greenness. We identified low soil depth to be the major stressor for understory vegetation in the studied plots. The RGB indices were good proxies to detect plant stress (e.g. Channel G%: r = −0.77, p < 0.001) and showed high correlation with NDVI (r = 0.75, p < 0.001). Ordinary cameras and modified cameras with the infrared filter removed were found to perform equally well.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 2534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willibroad Gabila Buma ◽  
Sang-Il Lee

As the world population keeps increasing and cultivating more land, the extraction of vegetation conditions using remote sensing is important for monitoring land changes in areas with limited ground observations. Water supply in wetlands directly affects plant growth and biodiversity, which makes monitoring drought an important aspect in such areas. Vegetation Temperature Condition Index (VTCI) which depends on thermal stress and vegetation state, is widely used as an indicator for drought monitoring using satellite data. In this study, using clear-sky Landsat multispectral images, VTCI was derived from Land Surface Temperature (LST) and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Derived VTCI was used to observe the drought patterns of the wetlands in Lake Chad between 1999 and 2018. The proportion of vegetation from WorldView-3 images was later introduced to evaluate the methods used. With an overall accuracy exceeding 90% and a kappa coefficient greater than 0.8, these methods accurately acquired vegetation training samples and adaptive thresholds, allowing for accurate estimations of the spatially distributed VTCI. The results obtained present a coherent spatial distribution of VTCI values estimated using LST and NDVI. Most areas during the study period experienced mild drought conditions, though severe cases were often seen around the northern part of the lake. With limited in-situ data in this area, this study presents how VTCI estimations can be developed for drought monitoring using satellite observations. This further shows the usefulness of remote sensing to improve the information about areas that are difficult to access or with poor availability of conventional meteorological data.


Author(s):  
Ankita P. Kamble ◽  
A. A. Atre ◽  
Payal A. Mahadule ◽  
C. B. Pande ◽  
N. S. Kute ◽  
...  

Pests and diseases cause major harm during crop development. Also plant stress affects crop quality and quantity. Recent developments in high resolution remotely sensed data has seen a great potential in mapping cropland areas infected by pests and diseases, as well as potential vulnerable areas over expansive areas. Crop health monitoring in this study was carried out using remote sensing techniques. The present study was carried out in MPKV, Rahuri, Ahmednagar District, Maharashtra. Vegetation indices like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) were used to classify the crops into healthy and dead or unhealthy one. Sentinel-2 image data from October 2019 to January 2020 processed in Arc GIS 10.1 were used for this study. Vegetation is a key component of the ecosystem and plays an important role in stabilizing the global environment. The result showed that the average vegetation cover was decreased in the month of November and healthy vegetation was found more in month of October as compared to December and January. This shows that NDVI and SAVI indices for Sentinel-2 images can be used for crop health monitoring.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quan Xiong ◽  
Yuan Wang ◽  
Diyou Liu ◽  
Sijing Ye ◽  
Zhenbo Du ◽  
...  

Nowadays, GF-1 (GF is the acronym for GaoFen which means high-resolution in Chinese) remote sensing images are widely utilized in agriculture because of their high spatio-temporal resolution and free availability. However, due to the transferrable rationale of optical satellites, the GF-1 remote sensing images are inevitably impacted by clouds, which leads to a lack of ground object’s information of crop areas and adds noises to research datasets. Therefore, it is crucial to efficiently detect the cloud pixel of GF-1 imagery of crop areas with powerful performance both in time consumption and accuracy when it comes to large-scale agricultural processing and application. To solve the above problems, this paper proposed a cloud detection approach based on hybrid multispectral features (HMF) with dynamic thresholds. This approach combined three spectral features, namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), WHITENESS and the Haze-Optimized Transformation (HOT), to detect the cloud pixels, which can take advantage of the hybrid Multispectral Features. Meanwhile, in order to meet the variety of the threshold values in different seasons, a dynamic threshold adjustment method was adopted, which builds a relationship between the features and a solar altitude angle to acquire a group of specific thresholds for an image. With the test of GF-1 remote sensing datasets and comparative trials with Random Forest (RF), the results show that the method proposed in this paper not only has high accuracy, but also has advantages in terms of time consumption. The average accuracy of cloud detection can reach 90.8% and time consumption for each GF-1 imagery can reach to 5 min, which has been reduced by 83.27% compared with RF method. Therefore, the approach presented in this work could serve as a reference for those who are interested in the cloud detection of remote sensing images.


Soil Research ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 44 (8) ◽  
pp. 759
Author(s):  
Fares M. Howari ◽  
Ahmed Murad ◽  
Hassan Garamoon

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a major source of water depletion in arid and semi-arid environments; and it is a poorly quantified variable in the hydrological cycle. Remote sensing has the potential application to quantify this variable especially at large scale. The present study reports methodology useful to determine whether derived variables from remotely sensed data, such as vegetation and soil brightness indices, could be used to predict ET. To achieve this goal, various regression analyses were conducted between data derived from satellites, field meteorological stations, and ET values. Selected sub-scenes of Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper images free of cloud were used to derive Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Soil Brightness Index using ER-Mapper and JMP software packages. From the obtained relationship between NDVI and ET, it was observed that ET increases sharply with increase in NDVI. The predicted ET results obtained from the multiple regression functions of field ET, NDVI, solar radiation, wind velocity, and/or temperature are comparable with the ET values obtained by Penman-Monteith method. The results showed that a remotely sensed vegetation index could be used, indirectly, to determine ET values. However, there is still considerable work to be done before simple and full automated extraction of ET from the reported methods can be achieved for large-scale applications.


Author(s):  
P. V. Aswathi ◽  
B. R. Nikam ◽  
A. Chouksey ◽  
S. P. Aggarwal

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Drought is a recurring climatic event characterized by slow onset, a gradual increase in its intensity, and persistence for a long period depending upon the availability of water. Droughts, broadly classified into meteorological, hydrological and agricultural drought, which are interconnected to each other. India, being an agriculture based economy depends primarily on agriculture production for its economic development and stability. The occurrence of agriculture drought affects the agricultural yield, which affects the regional economy to a larger extent. In present study, agricultural and meteorological drought in Maharashtra state was monitored using traditional as well as remote sensing methods. The meteorological drought assessment and characterization is done using two standard meteorological drought indices viz. standard precipitation index (SPI) and effective drought index (EDI). The severity and persistency of meteorological drought were studied using SPI for the period 1901 to 2015. However, accuracy of SPI in detection of sub-monthly drought is limited. Therefore, sub-monthly drought is effectively monitored using EDI. The monthly and sub-monthly drought mapped using SPI and EDI, respectively were then compared and assessed. It was concluded that EDI serves as a better indicator to monitor sub-monthly droughts. The agricultural drought monitoring was carried out using the remote sensing based indices such as vegetation condition index (VCI), temperature condition index (TCI), vegetation health index (VHI), shortwave angle slope index (SASI) and the index which maps the agricultural drought in a better way was identified. The area under drought as calculated by various agricultural drought indices compared with that of the EDI, it was found that the results of SASI matched with results of EDI. SASI denotes different values for the dry and wet soil and for the healthy and sparse vegetation. SASI monitors the agricultural drought better as compared to other indices used in this study.</p>


Időjárás ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 125 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-476
Author(s):  
Tahereh Sadat Mirmohammadhosseini ◽  
Seyed Abbas Hosseini ◽  
Bagher Ghermezcheshmeh ◽  
Ahmad Sharafati

Drought is a natural phenomenon that causes a lot of damages annually in various sectors, including agriculture and natural resources. The aim of this study is to evaluate the influence of meteorological drought index on vegetation index. For this purpose, the standard precipitation index (SPI) as a meteorological drought index is calculated using the precipitation data of 28 meteorological stations located on the area of Lorestane province, Iran, during the years 1987–2017. Then, the vegetation condition index (VCI) is computed using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) images that obtained from MODIS images of Terra satellite during 2000–2017. Dry, normal, and wet years were obtained based on the SPI results for 2008, 2013, and 2016, respectively. SPI and VCI were correlated using Pearson's correlation method. The results of the relationship between VCI and SPI showed that the highest Pearson correlation coefficient related to 9-month SPI in November was equal to 0.64. Multivariate linear regression was also performed between SPI and VCI, and the results showed that SPI was significantly correlated with VCI at 5% level over a period of 9 and 12 months. Finally, a confusion matrix was used to evaluate the compliance of the SPI and VCI drought classes. Results showed that the VCI had the highest compliance in the moderate drought class with SPI.


2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 649-659 ◽  
Author(s):  
Godfrey Mutowo ◽  
David Chikodzi

Purpose – Drought monitoring is an important process for national agricultural and environmental planning. Droughts are normal recurring climatic phenomena that affect people and landscapes. They occur at different scales (locally, regionally, and nationally), and for periods of time ranging from weeks to decades. In Zimbabwe drought is increasingly becoming an annual phenomenon, with varying parts of the country being affected. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the spatial variations in the seasonal occurrences of drought in Zimbabwe over a period of five years. Design/methodology/approach – The Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), which shows how close the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index of the current time is to the minimum Normalized Difference Vegetation Index calculated from the long-term record for that given time, was used to monitor drought occurrence in Zimbabwe. A time series of dekadal Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, calculated from SPOT images, was used to compute seasonal VCI maps from 2005 to 2010. The VCI maps were then classified into three drought severity classes (severe, moderate, and mild) based on the relative changes in the vegetation condition from extremely bad to optimal. Findings – The results showed that droughts occur annually in Zimbabwe though, on average, the droughts are mostly mild. The occurrence and the spatial distribution of drought in Zimbabwe was also found to be random affecting different places from season to season thus the authors conclude that most parts of the country are drought prone. Originality/value – Remote sensing technologies utilising such indices as the VCI can be used for drought monitoring in Zimbabwe.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-13
Author(s):  

Northeast Thailand is a predominantly agriculture-based region yet it suffers from drought which threatens the people’s livelihood. The region is the largest producer of sugar cane and cassava in the country which are classified as high-value, food and energy crops. Thailand ranks first and third in the world in terms of exporting cassava and sugar cane respectively. Unfortunately, when compared to other regions, the northeast receives the least attention in terms of agricultural research yet it is the most vulnerable part of the country. As such, the goal of this study was to assess agricultural drought in the region pertaining to sugar cane and cassava farming over twelve years (2004 to 2015) relative to the climatic conditions. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)-based Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), derived from Landsat 5 and 8 satellites (30 meters’ resolution) was usedas a determinant of agricultural drought. Precipitation and temperature (0.25-degree resolution) data were sourced from GLDAS-2 Noah model products. Temporal-VCI indicated that the major agricultural drought periods for both crops were 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2011. A significant improvement in the crops’ condition was noted in 2014 and 2015. Similarly, spatial-VCI showed an increase in VCI for 2014 and 2015 despite these being major meteorological drought years. This supports the premise that the region has made efforts to curb the effects of drought on agriculture. However, continuous monitoring of drought using different physical indicators is necessary for further development of effective solutions and sharpening of the currently existing measures


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunchun An ◽  
Zhi Dong ◽  
Hongli Li ◽  
Wentai Zhao ◽  
Hailiang Chen

Remote sensing phenology retrieval can remedy the deficiencies in field investigations and has the advantage of catching the continuous characteristics of phenology on a large scale. However, there are some discrepancies in the results of remote sensing phenological metrics derived from different vegetation indices based on different extraction algorithms, and there are few studies that evaluate the impact of different vegetation indices on phenological metrics extraction. In this study, three satellite-derived vegetation indices (enhanced vegetation index, EVI; normalized difference vegetation index, NDVI; and normalized difference phenology index, NDPI; calculated using surface reflectance data from MOD09A1) and two algorithms were used to detect the start and end of growing season (SOS and EOS, respectively) in the Tibetan Plateau (TP). Then, the retrieved SOS and EOS were evaluated from different aspects. Results showed that the missing rates of both SOS and EOS based on the Seasonal Trend Decomposition by LOESS (STL) trendline crossing method were higher than those based on the seasonal amplitude method (SA), and the missing rate varied using different vegetation indices among different vegetation types. Also, the temporal and spatial stabilities of phenological metrics based on SA using EVI or NDPI were more stable than those from others. The accuracy assessment based on ground observations showed that phenological metrics based on SA had better agreements with ground observations than those based on STL, and EVI or NDVI may be more appropriate for monitoring SOS than NDPI in the TP, while EOS from NDPI had better agreements with ground-observed EOS. Besides, the phenological metrics over the complex terrain also presented worse performances than those over the flat terrain. Our findings suggest that previous results of inter-annual variability of phenology from a single data or method should be treated with caution.


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