In the aftermath of the severe droughts and floods at the end of the 20th century, the Chinese government launched several ecological restoration projects, including the Natural Forest Protection Program in 1998 and the Grain-for-Green Program in 1999, to promote afforestation and reforestation to reduce surface runoff and consequent soil erosion nationwide. However, it is still unclear how veg...

Timely and accurate monitoring of cropping intensity (CI) is essential to help us understand changes in food production. This paper aims to develop an automatic Cropping Intensity extraction method based on the Isolines of Wavelet Spectra (CIIWS) with consideration of intra-class variability. The CIIWS method involves the following procedures: (1) characterizing vegetation dynamics from time–fr...

The objectives are to (1) quantify, map, and analyze vegetation cover distributions and changes across Accra, Ghana, for 2002 and 2010; and (2) examine the statistical relationship between vegetation cover and a housing quality index (HQI) for 2000 at the neighborhood level. Pixel-level vegetation cover maps derived using threshold classification of 2002 and 2010 QuickBird normalized difference...

[1] Synoptic monitoring of vegetation dynamics relies on satellite observations of the distinctive spectral contrast between red and near infrared reflectance that photosynthetically active green vegetation exhibits. It has long been recognized that the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) suffers a rapid decrease of sensitivity at moderate-to-high densities of photosynthetic green bio...

Spectral vegetation indices are frequently used to estimate vegetation biophysical/biochemical characteristics. In general they have been proposed to reduce spectral effects caused by external factors such as the atmosphere and the soil background. This study evaluated narrow band vegetation indices for estimation of vegetation leaf area index. The study takes advantage of using a dataset colle...

Accurate quantification of gross primary production (GPP) at regional and global scales is essential for carbon budgets and climate change studies. Five models, the vegetation photosynthesis model (VPM), the temperature and greenness model (TG), the alpine vegetation model (AVM), the greenness and radiation model (GR), and the MOD17 algorithm, were tested and calibrated at eight sites in China ...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key flux in the water cycle and has strong seasonal dynamics for forest ecosystems. Recently eddy flux covariance measurements are continuously taken at a temperate mixed forest in Northeastern China since 2002. In an effort to better understanding the factors that control the seasonal dynamics of ET, here we (1) calculate ecosystem-level water use efficiency (WUE) ...

Within the context of climate change, it is of utmost importance to quantify the stability of ecosystems with respect to climate anomalies. It is well acknowledged that ecosystem stability may change over time. As these temporal stability changes may provide a warning for increased vulnerability of the system, this study provides a methodology to quantify and assess these temporal changes in ve...

This paper overviews the evaluation and the performance of the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) Global Vegetation Index (MGVI) algorithm which is implemented in the MERIS ground segment as the main land surface product, also called the Top Of Atmosphere Vegetation Index (TOAVI). MGVI values represent the Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR) which act as...