I declare that this research report is my own unaided work. It is being submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of Science at the University of the Witwatersrand. It has not been submitted before for any degree or examination at any other university. Figure 1 Map showing the location of the study area. White areas represent privately owned land used for Figure 3: Long-term (198...

This study aimed at evaluating the response of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index NDVI (MODIS sensor, TERRA satellite) of soybean to interannual variability of rainfall and evapotranspiration in Campos Gerais, a region of the state of Parana in southern Brazil. Landsat TM 5 and 7 images were selected for analyzing the spatial soybean field distribution for the region from 2000/01 to 200...

Evapotranspiration estimation has benefitted from recent advances in remote sensing and GIS techniques particularly in agricultural applications rather than urban environments. This paper explores the relationship between urban vegetation evapotranspiration (ET) and vegetation indices derived from newly-developed high spatial resolution WorldView-2 imagery. The study site was Veale Gardens in A...

The temporal-spatial interaction of land cover and non-point source (NPS) nutrient pollution were analyzed with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to simulate the temporal-spatial features of NPS nutrient loading in the upper stream of the Yellow River catchment. The corresponding land cover data variance was expressed by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) that was calcula...

Vegetation is an important part of terrestrial ecosystems. Although vegetation dynamics have explicit spatial and temporal dimensions, the study of the temporal process is in its infancy. Evaluation of temporal scaling behavior could provide a unique perspective for exploring the temporal nature of vegetation dynamics. In this study, the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) Nor...

Rainfall events can be characterized as "pulses", which are discrete and variable episodes that can significantly influence the structure and function of desert ecosystems, including shifts in aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP). To determine the threshold and hierarchical response of rainfall event size on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI, a proxy for ANPP) and the diff...

Temporal-related features are important for improving land cover classification accuracy using remote sensing data. This study investigated the efficacy of phenological features extracted from time series MODIS Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data in improving the land cover classification accuracy of Landsat data. The MODIS NDVI data were first fused with Landsat data via the Spa...

To explore the importance of the Eurasian steppe region (EASR) in global carbon cycling, we analyzed the spatiotemporal dynamics of the aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) of the entire EASR from 1982 to 2013. The ANPP in the EASR was estimated from the Integrated ANPPNDVI model, which is an empirical model developed based on field-observed ANPP and long-term normalized difference veget...

We determine the vegetation type for the CART from a database generated by the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS 1990). Soil types were provided by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program from the State Soil Geographic (STATSGO) database and mapped into the USDA classifications described by Clapp and Hornberger (1978). To provide the input parameters of temperature, pressure, humidity, ...

Remote sensing of terrestrial vegetation has been successful thanks to the unique spectral characteristics of green vegetation, low reflectance in red and high reflectance in Near-InfraRed (NIR). These spectral characteristics were used to develop vegetation indices, including Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). However, the NIR absorption by water and light scattering from suspended...