Spaceborne laser altimetry waveform estimates of canopy Gap Fraction (GF) vary with respect to discrete return airborne equivalents due to their greater sensitivity to reflectance differences between canopy and ground surfaces resulting from differences in footprint size, energy thresholding, noise characteristics and sampling geometry. Applying scaling factors to either the ground or canopy po...

Communities dominated by Baccharis pilularis (coyote brush) are expanding in coastal California, altering fuel load on a landscape scale, yet there is no standard method for estimating biomass in this vegetation type. In an attempt to develop a non-destructive field method for estimating biomass in Baccharisdominated communities, we compared three indirect measures including crown canopy height...

Vegetation spatial structure including plant height, biomass, vertical and horizontal heterogeneity, is an important factor influencing the exchanges of matter and energy between landscape and atmosphere, and the biodiversity of ecosystems. Regional and global forest biomass and forest structure estimation is essential for understanding and monitoring ecosystem responses to human activities and...

Desert vegetation plays significant roles in securing the ecological integrity of oasis ecosystems in western China. Timely monitoring of photosynthetic/non-photosynthetic desert vegetation cover is necessary to guide management practices on land desertification and research into the mechanisms driving vegetation recession. In this study, nonlinear spectral mixture effects for photosynthetic/no...

For many natural and agricultural landscapes, vegetation partially covers the ground surface, resulting in significant variations in soil heat flux between interspace areas and underneath vegetation. This is particularly apparent in arid and semiarid regions where vegetation cover is low and clustered or ‘clumped’ with large areas of exposed soil. Surface heterogeneity presents significant chal...

Vegetative surfaces are non-lambertian and deriving their spectral properties from space-borne sensors becomes complicated when off-nadir view angles are taken into consideration. In order to utilize off-nadir observations a complete understanding of directional reflectance is needed. This requires understanding of propagation of solar radiation as radiative transfer (RT) problem through a coup...

Pan-sharpening is the process of fusing higher spatial resolution panchromatic (PAN) with lower spatial resolution multispectral (MS) imagery to create higher spatial resolution MS images. Here, our overall objective was to pan-sharpen Landsat-8 images and calculate vegetation greenness (i.e., normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)), canopy structure (i.e., enhanced vegetation index (EVI...

Triana is an Earth remote sensing satellite to be located at the distant Langrange Point L-1, the gravity-neutral point between the Earth and the Sun. It will provide continuous full disk images ofthe entire sunlit side of the Earth with 8 km pixel resolution. The primary remote sensing instrument on Triana is a calibrated multispectral iniager with 10 spectral channels in the UV, VIS, and MR b...

planting shrub seedlings under oil mulches has frequently been used for stabilizing mobile sands in iran for during the last three decades. sandy desert of samad abad, sarakhs, northeast iran, has been fixed by cultivating seedling of haloxylon aphyllum under the oil mulches. therefore this study was designed to investigate the effects of the sand fixation project on soil and vegetation propert...