scholarly journals Status of Phenological Research Using Sentinel-2 Data: A Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 2760
Author(s):  
Gourav Misra ◽  
Fiona Cawkwell ◽  
Astrid Wingler

Remote sensing of plant phenology as an indicator of climate change and for mapping land cover has received significant scientific interest in the past two decades. The advancing of spring events, the lengthening of the growing season, the shifting of tree lines, the decreasing sensitivity to warming and the uniformity of spring across elevations are a few of the important indicators of trends in phenology. The Sentinel-2 satellite sensors launched in June 2015 (A) and March 2017 (B), with their high temporal frequency and spatial resolution for improved land mapping missions, have contributed significantly to knowledge on vegetation over the last three years. However, despite the additional red-edge and short wave infra-red (SWIR) bands available on the Sentinel-2 multispectral instruments, with improved vegetation species detection capabilities, there has been very little research on their efficacy to track vegetation cover and its phenology. For example, out of approximately every four papers that analyse normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) or enhanced vegetation index (EVI) derived from Sentinel-2 imagery, only one mentions either SWIR or the red-edge bands. Despite the short duration that the Sentinel-2 platforms have been operational, they have proved their potential in a wide range of phenological studies of crops, forests, natural grasslands, and other vegetated areas, and in particular through fusion of the data with those from other sensors, e.g., Sentinel-1, Landsat and MODIS. This review paper discusses the current state of vegetation phenology studies based on the first five years of Sentinel-2, their advantages, limitations, and the scope for future developments.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
pp. 2043 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jia ◽  
Wang ◽  
Wang ◽  
Mao ◽  
Zhang

Mangrove forests are tropical trees and shrubs that grow in sheltered intertidal zones. Accurate mapping of mangrove forests is a great challenge for remote sensing because mangroves are periodically submerged by tidal floods. Traditionally, multi-tides images were needed to remove the influence of water; however, such images are often unavailable due to rainy climates and uncertain local tidal conditions. Therefore, extracting mangrove forests from a single-tide imagery is of great importance. In this study, reflectance of red-edge bands in Sentinel-2 imagery were utilized to establish a new vegetation index that is sensitive to submerged mangrove forests. Specifically, red and short-wave near infrared bands were used to build a linear baseline; the average reflectance value of four red-edge bands above the baseline is defined as the Mangrove Forest Index (MFI). To evaluate MFI, capabilities of detecting mangrove forests were quantitatively assessed between MFI and four widely used vegetation indices (VIs). Additionally, the practical roles of MFI were validated by applying it to three mangrove forest sites globally. Results showed that: (1) theoretically, Jensen–Shannon divergence demonstrated that a submerged mangrove forest and water pixels have the largest distance in MFI compared to other VIs. In addition, the boxplot showed that all submerged mangrove forests could be separated from the water background in the MFI image. Furthermore, in the MFI image, to separate mangrove forests and water, the threshold is a constant that is equal to zero. (2) Practically, after applying the MFI to three global sites, 99–102% of submerged mangrove forests were successfully extracted by MFI. Although there are still some uncertainties and limitations, the MFI offers great benefits in accurately mapping mangrove forests as well as other coastal and aquatic vegetation worldwide.


Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 505
Author(s):  
Gregoriy Kaplan ◽  
Offer Rozenstein

Satellite remote sensing is a useful tool for estimating crop variables, particularly Leaf Area Index (LAI), which plays a pivotal role in monitoring crop development. The goal of this study was to identify the optimal Sentinel-2 bands for LAI estimation and to derive Vegetation Indices (VI) that are well correlated with LAI. Linear regression models between time series of Sentinel-2 imagery and field-measured LAI showed that Sentinel-2 Band-8A—Narrow Near InfraRed (NIR) is more accurate for LAI estimation than the traditionally used Band-8 (NIR). Band-5 (Red edge-1) showed the lowest performance out of all red edge bands in tomato and cotton. A novel finding was that Band 9 (Water vapor) showed a very high correlation with LAI. Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, and 12 were saturated at LAI ≈ 3 in cotton and tomato. Bands 6, 7, 8, 8A, and 9 were not saturated at high LAI values in cotton and tomato. The tomato, cotton, and wheat LAI estimation performance of ReNDVI (R2 = 0.79, 0.98, 0.83, respectively) and two new VIs (WEVI (Water vapor red Edge Vegetation Index) (R2 = 0.81, 0.96, 0.71, respectively) and WNEVI (Water vapor narrow NIR red Edge Vegetation index) (R2 = 0.79, 0.98, 0.79, respectively)) were higher than the LAI estimation performance of the commonly used NDVI (R2 = 0.66, 0.83, 0.05, respectively) and other common VIs tested in this study. Consequently, reNDVI, WEVI, and WNEVI can facilitate more accurate agricultural monitoring than traditional VIs.


Fire ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 68
Author(s):  
Sarah A. Lewis ◽  
Peter R. Robichaud ◽  
Andrew T. Hudak ◽  
Eva K. Strand ◽  
Jan U. H. Eitel ◽  
...  

As wildland fires amplify in size in many regions in the western USA, land and water managers are increasingly concerned about the deleterious effects on drinking water supplies. Consequences of severe wildfires include disturbed soils and areas of thick ash cover, which raises the concern of the risk of water contamination via ash. The persistence of ash cover and depth were monitored for up to 90 days post-fire at nearly 100 plots distributed between two wildfires in Idaho and Washington, USA. Our goal was to determine the most ‘cost’ effective, operational method of mapping post-wildfire ash cover in terms of financial, data volume, time, and processing costs. Field measurements were coupled with multi-platform satellite and aerial imagery collected during the same time span. The image types spanned the spatial resolution of 30 m to sub-meter (Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, WorldView-2, and a drone), while the spectral resolution spanned visible through SWIR (short-wave infrared) bands, and they were all collected at various time scales. We that found several common vegetation and post-fire spectral indices were correlated with ash cover (r = 0.6–0.85); however, the blue normalized difference vegetation index (BNDVI) with monthly Sentinel-2 imagery was especially well-suited for monitoring the change in ash cover during its ephemeral period. A map of the ash cover can be used to estimate the ash load, which can then be used as an input into a hydrologic model predicting ash transport and fate, helping to ultimately improve our ability to predict impacts on downstream water resources.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 2807 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Bayle ◽  
Bradley Carlson ◽  
Vincent Thierion ◽  
Marc Isenmann ◽  
Philippe Choler

Shrub encroachment into grassland and rocky habitats is a noticeable land cover change currently underway in temperate mountains and is a matter of concern for the sustainable management of mountain biodiversity. Current land cover products tend to underestimate the extent of mountain shrublands dominated by Ericaceae (Vaccinium spp. (species) and Rhododendron ferrugineum). In addition, mountain shrubs are often confounded with grasslands. Here, we examined the potential of anthocyanin-responsive vegetation indices to provide more accurate maps of mountain shrublands in a mountain range located in the French Alps. We relied on the multi-spectral instrument onboard the Sentinel-2A and 2B satellites and the availability of red-edge bands to calculate a Normalized Anthocyanin Reflectance Index (NARI). We used this index to quantify the autumn accumulation of anthocyanin in canopies dominated by Vaccinium spp. and Rhododendron ferrugineum and compared the effectiveness of NARI to Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as a basis for shrubland mapping. Photointerpretation of high-resolution aerial imagery, intensive field campaigns, and floristic surveys provided complementary data to calibrate and evaluate model performance. The proposed NARI-based model performed better than the NDVI-based model with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.92 against 0.58. Validation of shrub cover maps based on NARI resulted in a Kappa coefficient of 0.67, which outperformed existing land cover products and resulted in a ten-fold increase in estimated area occupied by Ericaceae-dominated shrublands. We conclude that the Sentinel-2 red-edge band provides novel opportunities to detect seasonal anthocyanin accumulation in plant canopies and discuss the potential of our method to quantify long-term dynamics of shrublands in alpine and arctic contexts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (No. 8) ◽  
pp. 339-348
Author(s):  
Viktoriia Lovynska ◽  
Yuriy Buchavyi ◽  
Petro Lakyda ◽  
Svitlana Sytnyk ◽  
Yuriy Gritzan ◽  
...  

The present study offers the results of the spectral characteristics, calculated vegetative indices and biophysical parameters of pine stands of the Northern Steppe of Ukraine region obtained using Sentinel-2 data. For the development of regression models with the prediction of the biomass of pine forests using the obtained spectral characteristics, we used the results of the assessment of the aboveground biomass by the method of field surveys. The results revealed the highest correlation relations between the parameters of the general and trunk biomass with the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) and transformed vegetation index (TVI) vegetative indices and the fraction of absorbed photosynthetic active radiation (FARAP) and fraction of vegetation cover (FCOVER) biophysical parameters. To generate the models of determining the forest aboveground biomass (AGB), we used both the single- and two-factor models, the most optimum of which were those containing the NDVI predictor separately and in combination with the FCOVER predictor. The predicted values of the total AGB for the mentioned models equalled 32.5 to 236.3 and 39.9 to 253.4 t·ha<sup>–1</sup>. We performed mapping of the AGB of pine stands of the Northern Steppe using multi-spectral Sentinel-2 images, particularly the spectral characteristics of their derivatives (vegetative indices, biophysical parameters). This study demonstrated promising results for conducting an AGB-mapping of pine woods in the studied region using free-access resources.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 1176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yukun Lin ◽  
Zhe Zhu ◽  
Wenxuan Guo ◽  
Yazhou Sun ◽  
Xiaoyuan Yang ◽  
...  

Monitoring cotton status during the growing season is critical in increasing production efficiency. The water status in cotton is a key factor for yield and cotton quality. Stem water potential (SWP) is a precise indicator for assessing cotton water status. Satellite remote sensing is an effective approach for monitoring cotton growth at a large scale. The aim of this study is to estimate cotton water stress at a high temporal frequency and at a large scale. In this study, we measured midday SWP samples according to the acquisition dates of Sentinel-2 images and used them to build linear-regression-based and machine-learning-based models to estimate cotton water stress during the growing season (June to August, 2018). For the linear-regression-based method, we estimated SWP based on different Sentinel-2 spectral bands and vegetation indices, where the normalized difference index 45 (NDI45) achieved the best performance (R2 = 0.6269; RMSE = 3.6802 (-1*swp (bars))). For the machine-learning-based method, we used random forest regression to estimate SWP and received even better results (R2 = 0.6709; RMSE = 3.3742 (-1*swp (bars))). To find the best selection of input variables for the machine-learning-based approach, we tried three different data input datasets, including (1) 9 original spectral bands (e.g., blue, green, red, red edge, near infrared (NIR), and shortwave infrared (SWIR)), (2) 21 vegetation indices, and (3) a combination of original Sentinel-2 spectral bands and vegetation indices. The highest accuracy was achieved when only the original spectral bands were used. We also found the SWIR and red edge band were the most important spectral bands, and the vegetation indices based on red edge and NIR bands were particularly helpful. Finally, we applied the best approach for the linear-regression-based and the machine-learning-based methods to generate cotton water potential maps at a large scale and high temporal frequency. Results suggests that the methods developed here has the potential for continuous monitoring of SWP at large scales and the machine-learning-based method is preferred.


2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary A. Holden ◽  
Penelope Morgan ◽  
Alistair M. S. Smith ◽  
Lee Vierling

Methods of remotely measuring burn severity are needed to evaluate the ecological and environmental impacts of large, remote wildland fires. The challenges that were associated with the Landsat program highlight the need to evaluate alternative sensors for characterising post-fire effects. We compared statistical correlations between 55 Composite Burn Index field plots and spectral indices from four satellite sensors varying in spatial and spectral resolution on the 2003 Dry Lakes Fire in the Gila Wilderness, NM. Where spectrally feasible, burn severity was evaluated using the differenced Enhanced Vegetation Index (dEVI), differenced Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (dNDVI) and the differenced Normalised Burn Ratio (dNBR). Both the dEVI derived from Quickbird and the dNBR derived from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) showed similar or slightly improved correlations over the dNBR derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper data (R2 = 0.82, 0.84, and 0.78 respectively). The relatively coarse resolution MODIS-derived NDVI image was weakly correlated with ground data (R2 = 0.38). Our results suggest that moderately high-resolution satellite sensors like Quickbird and ASTER have potential for providing accurate information about burn severity. Future research should develop stronger links between higher-resolution satellite data and burn severity across a range of environments.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 1530
Author(s):  
Valentina Olmo ◽  
Enrico Tordoni ◽  
Francesco Petruzzellis ◽  
Giovanni Bacaro ◽  
Alfredo Altobelli

On the 29th of October 2018, a storm named “Vaia” hit North-Eastern Italy, causing the loss of 8 million m3 of standing trees and creating serious damage to the forested areas, with many economic and ecological implications. This event brought up the necessity of a standard procedure for windthrow detection and monitoring based on satellite data as an alternative to foresters’ fieldwork. The proposed methodology was applied in Carnic Alps (Friuli Venezia Giulia, NE Italy) in natural stands dominated by Picea abies and Abies alba. We used images from the Sentinel-2 mission: 1) to test vegetation indices performance in monitoring the vegetation dynamics in the short period after the storm, and 2) to create a windthrow map for the whole Friuli Venezia Giulia region. Results showed that windthrows in forests have a significant influence on visible and short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral bands of Sentinel-2, both in the short and the long-term timeframes. NDWI8A and NDWI were the best indices for windthrow detection (R2 = 0.80 and 0.77, respectively) and NDVI, PSRI, SAVI and GNDVI had an overall good performance in spotting wind-damaged areas (R2 = 0.60–0.76). Moreover, these indices allowed to monitor post-Vaia forest die-off and showed a dynamic recovery process in cleaned sites. The NDWI8A index, employed in the vegetation index differencing (VID) change detection technique, delimited damaged areas comparable to the estimations provided by Regional Forest System (2545 ha and 3183 ha, respectively). Damaged forests detected by NDWI8A VID ranged from 500 m to 1500 m a.s.l., mainly covering steep slopes in the south and east aspects (42% and 25%, respectively). Our results suggested that the NDWI8A VID method may be a cost-effective and accurate way to produce windthrow maps, which could limit the risks associated with fieldwork and may provide a valuable tool to plan tree removal interventions in a more efficient way.


OENO One ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Sozzi ◽  
Ahmed Kayad ◽  
Francesco Marinello ◽  
James Taylor ◽  
Bruno Tisseyre

Aim: The recent availability of Sentinel-2 satellites has led to an increasing interest in their use in viticulture. The aim of this short communication is to determine performance and limitation of a Sentinel-2 vegetation index in precision viticulture applications, in terms of correlation and variability assessment, compared to the same vegetation index derived from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used as reference vegetation index.Methods and Results: UAV and Sentinel-2 vegetation indices were acquired for 30 vineyard blocks located in the south of France without inter-row grass. From the UAV imagery, the vegetation index was calculated using both a mixed pixels approach (both vine and inter-row) and from pure vine-only pixels. In addition, the vine projected area data were extracted using a support vector machine algorithm for vineyard segmentation. The vegetation index was obtained from Sentinel-2 imagery obtained at approximately the same time as the UAV imagery. The Sentinel-2 images used a mixed pixel approach as pixel size is greater than the row width. The correlation between these three layers and the Sentinel-2 derived vegetation indices were calculated, considering spatial autocorrelation correction for the significance test. The Gini coefficient was used to estimate variability detected by each sensor at the within-field scale. The effects of block border and dimension on correlations were estimated.Conclusions: The comparison between Sentinel-2 and UAV vegetation index showed an increase in correlation when border pixels were removed. Block dimensions did not affect the significance of correlation unless blocks were < 0.5 ha. Below this threshold, the correlation was non-significant in most cases. Sentinel-2 acquired data were strongly correlated with UAV-acquired data at both the field (R2 = 0.87) and sub-field scale (R2 = 0.84). In terms of variability detected, Sentinel-2 proved to be able to detect the same amount of variability as the UAV mixed pixel vegetation index.Significance and impact of the study: This study showed at which field conditions the Sentinel-2 vegetation index can be used instead of UAV-acquired images when high spatial resolution (vine-specific) management is not needed and the vineyard is characterised by no inter-row grass. This type of information may help growers to choose the most appropriate information sources to detect variability according to their vineyard characteristics.


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