Use of Remote Sensing-Derived Land Productive Capacity Dynamics for the New World Atlas of Desertification (WAD)

Monitoring and assessing land degradation dynamics involves extracting the most relevant information from time series of global satellite observations. The longest available satellite observation datasets with global coverage at 1-km resolution, from, e.g., the SPOT VGT sensor, have a continuous frequent temporal sampling over a long enough period, now 15 years, to allow extraction of proxy information on the phenology and seasonal productivity for each 1-km2 area on Earth. Building on numerous studies that use time series of remotely sensed vegetation indices (e.g., NDVI, Fapar) as base layer, we expand this set of variables by calculating phenological metrics from time series of the vegetation index. Disaggegation of the original time series into phenological metrics yields additional information on various aspects of vegetation/land-cover functional composition in relation to dynamics of ecosystem functioning and land use.

CHERLET Michael;  KUTNJAK Hrvoje;  SMID Marek;  SOMMER Stefan;  IVITS Eva; 

2016-01-21

Springer International Publishing

JRC99734

978-3-319-24110-4,    978-3-319-24112-8,   

2191-5547,    2191-5555,   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC99734,   

10.1007/978-3-319-24112-8,