0000000000531429
AUTHOR
Alessandro Cescatti
Global and time-resolved monitoring of crop photosynthesis with chlorophyll fluorescence
Guanter, Luis et al.
Sensitivity of L-band vegetation optical depth to carbon stocks in tropical forests: a comparison to higher frequencies and optical indices
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111303. Monitoring vegetation carbon in tropical regions is essential to the global carbon assessment and to evaluate the actions oriented to the reduction of forest degradation. Mainly, satellite optical vegetation indices and LiDAR data have been used to this purpose. These two techniques are limited by cloud cover and are sensitive only to the top of vegetation. In addition, the vegetation attenuation to the soil microwave emission, represented by the vegetation optical depth (VOD), has been applied for biomass estimation using frequencies ranging from 4 to 30¿GHz (C- to K-bands). Atmosphere is t…
Mapping Carbon Stocks In Central And South America With Smap Vegetation Optical Depth
Mapping carbon stocks in the tropics is essential for climate change mitigation. Passive microwave remote sensing allows estimating carbon from deep canopy layers through the Vegetation Optical Depth (VOD) parameter. Although their spatial resolution is coarser than that of optical vegetation indices or airborne Lidar data, microwaves present a higher penetration capacity at low frequencies (L-band) and avoid cloud masking. This work compares the relationships of airborne carbon maps in Central and South America with both (i) SMAP L-band VOD at 9 km gridding and (ii) MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI). Models to estimate carbon stocks are built from these two satellite-derived variables.…
Satellite Observations of the Contrasting Response of Trees and Grasses to Variations in Water Availability
Interannual variations in ecosystem primary productivity are dominated by water availability. Until recently, characterizing the photosynthetic response of different ecosystems to soil moisture anomalies was hampered by observational limitations. Here, we use a number of satellite-based proxies for productivity, including spectral indices, sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, and data-driven estimates of gross primary production, to reevaluate the relationship between terrestrial photosynthesis and water. In contrast to nonwoody vegetation, we find a resilience of forested ecosystems to reduced soil moisture. Sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence and data-driven gross primary production ind…
Spatial homogeneity from temporal stability: Exploiting the combined hyper-frequent revisit of Terra and Aqua to guide Earth System Science
Abstract The terrestrial component of the Earth system has witnessed considerable changes in the past decades due to anthropogenic action. Throughout this period, the NASA Terra mission has been constantly monitoring the surface with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument. When combined with the MODIS instrument on-board of the Aqua platform, we obtain a hyper-frequent revisit capability providing sub-daily observations globally at a moderate resolution of ~250 m, but with a strong multi-angular variation of the observation footprint. Here we propose to exploit this particular configuration provided by the combined Terra + Aqua constellation to infer spatial ho…
A unified vegetation index for quantifying the terrestrial biosphere
[EN] Empirical vegetation indices derived from spectral reflectance data are widely used in remote sensing of the biosphere, as they represent robust proxies for canopy structure, leaf pigment content, and, subsequently, plant photosynthetic potential. Here, we generalize the broad family of commonly used vegetation indices by exploiting all higher-order relations between the spectral channels involved. This results in a higher sensitivity to vegetation biophysical and physiological parameters. The presented nonlinear generalization of the celebrated normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) consistently improves accuracy in monitoring key parameters, such as leaf area index, gross prim…
Reply to Magnani et al.: Linking large-scale chlorophyll fluorescence observations with cropland gross primary production
Guanter, Luis et al.