Assessing factors influencing vegetation coverage calculation with remote sensing imagery

• Published in: International journal of remote sensing Vol. 30; no. 10; pp. 2479 - 2489
• Main Authors: Gu, Zhujun, Zeng, Zhiyuan, Shi, Xuezheng, Li, Lin, Yu, Dongsheng, Zheng, Wei, Zhang, Zhenlong, Hu, Zifu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Taylor & Francis 01.05.2009
• Subjects: Animal, plant and microbial ecology; Applied geophysics; Biological and medical sciences; Earth sciences; Earth, ocean, space; Exact sciences and technology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects. Techniques; Internal geophysics; Teledetection and vegetation maps; Far East; Asia; China; atmosphere; Performance evaluation; Polynomial; models; Vegetation index; Spot; remote sensing; vegetation; factor analysis; imagery; radiometry; statistical analysis; atmospheric correction; Influence factor; Reflectance
• ISSN: 0143-1161; 1366-5901
• DOI: 10.1080/01431160802552736

Influencing factor analysis is required for assessing the performance of vegetation fractional coverage (VFC) models with remote sensing imagery. This paper analyses influences of the radiometric correction level (RL), vegetation index (VI) and polynomial exponential power (EP) choice on VI-VFC relationship models. A SPOT 5 HRG image of Nanjing, China was chosen, and three RLs (digital number, top of atmosphere reflectance and post atmospheric correction reflectance) were used to derive six VIs, such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and ratio vegetation index (RVI). Fifty-four models describing the VI-VFC relationship were established, and the influences of the RL, VI and EP choice on the VI-VFC models were analysed based on a statistical analysis of determination coefficients (R 2 ) of these models. The results showed that model robustness was jointly influenced by the three factors, so these three factors should be synthetically taken into account in VI-VFC modelling. It is recommended to establish different models between the VFC and various VIs derived from different RLs, and then to select the better ones.