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Vegetation monitoring has been performed using remotely sensed images to secure food production, prevent fires, and protect natural ecosystems. Recent satellite sensors, such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), provide frequent wide-scale coverage in multiple areas of the spectrum, allowing the estimation of a wide range of specialized vegetation indices (VIs), each offering several advantages. It is not, however, clear which VI performs better during operational monitoring of wide-scale vegetation patches, such as CORINE Land Cover (CLC) classes. The aim of this work was to investigate the performance of several VIs in operational monitoring of vegetation condition of CLC vegetation types, using Terra MODIS data. Comparison among the VIs within each CLC class was conducted using the sensitivity ratio, a statistical measure that has not been used to compare VIs and does not require calibration curves between each VI and a biophysical parameter. In addition, the VI’s sensitivity t...

The failure of the Scan Line Corrector (SLC) of the Landsat ETM+ (Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus) instrument in 2003 had resulted in missing values for 22% of each scene. As the remaining pixels were of high quality, several procedures had been developed to fill the gaps and increase the usability of the SLC-off images. In this letter, a methodology is presented to assess the error when estimating quantitative parameters from gap-filled Landsat 7 images. The error from the gap-filling procedure was estimated using an external reference image. The methodology was applied in a Mediterranean river basin using two types of gap-filling methods and the error was estimated for leaf area index (LAI), actual evapotranspiration (ETa) and soil moisture in the rootzone (SMrz), three remotely sensed products which are commonly used in hydrological studies. The results suggest that the interpolation method had lower errors in all examined products. The proposed methodology is an imperative step that each user of gap-fil...

Monitoring soil erosion risk is an important part of soil conservation practices. It is usually estimated with the Universal Soil Loss Equation, and the C-factor (vegetation cover) is derived from optical satellite images. However, because of lack of data and resources, or in rapid assessments, C-factor is estimated using one or a few satellite observations, despite being temporally variable according to plants' phenology. The aim of this work was to study the effect of seasonality in estimating C-factor. This was achieved by demonstrating first that there is a difference when estimating soil erosion with Universal Soil Loss Equation at variable time steps in a year, namely once, seasonally and monthly. Using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer normalized difference vegetation index images and statistical analysis at subcatchment scale, it was shown that there is a significant difference when estimating mean annual soil loss with the aforementioned temporal options. The highest differences were observed between monthly and annual time steps. The second objective was to identify which is the optimum time to estimate C-factor in a year. The results show that November, October and March are the optimum months for single image estimation of annual soil erosion. Statistical analysis with a random point dataset suggested that the spatial variability of the results was influenced by the land cover type, especially in areas with variable leaf cover where a single date estimation of C-factor was not representative of the whole year, such as annual crops and deciduous trees. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Excessive use of irrigated water in the Mediterranean has deteriorated the freshwater resources by depleting the aquifers, discharging agri-chemicals and accelerating saltwater intrusion. Several European directives outline that estimating the extent of irrigated areas in each water basin is a primary step towards sustainable natural resources management. This paper aims to identify a low cost methodology for mapping irrigated area in Mediterranean basins, using satellite Earth Observation. After evaluating several combinations of land feature mapping techniques on digitally enhanced satellite images, the one with the highest accuracy has been identified (thresholding of the second principal component). The methodology was formulated under the assumption that irrigated land can be identified by the result of irrigation, i.e. the existence of green vegetation in the semiarid summer, thus avoiding costly field surveys, and using low cost satellite imagery. The proposed methodology has been applied to two Mediterranean basins with conflicting agronomic and ecological interests, which were of a different scale. The resulting irrigated area map achieved high accuracy (up to 98.4%) and reliability ([email protected]? up to 0.967) in both basins. The results were also displayed as irrigation intensity to improve visualisation and help identify areas of high environmental pressure on nearby wetlands.

Monitoring vegetation condition is an important issue in the Mediterranean region, in terms of both securing food and preventing fires. The recent abundance of remotely sensed data, such as the daily availability of MODIS imagery, raises the issue of appropriate temporal sampling when monitoring vegetation: under-sampling may not accurately describe the phenomenon under consideration, whilst over-sampling would increase the cost of the project without additional benefit. The aim of this work is to estimate the optimum temporal resolution for vegetation monitoring on a nationwide scale using 250 m MODIS/Terra daily images and composites. Specific objectives include: (i) an investigation into the optimum temporal resolution for monitoring vegetation condition during the dry season on a nationwide scale using time-series analysis of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, NDVI, datasets, (ii) an investigation into whether this temporal resolution differs between the two major vegetation categories of natural and managed vegetation, and (iii) a quality assessment of multi-temporal NDVI composites following the proposed optimum temporal resolution. A time-series of daily NDVI data is developed for Greece using MODIS/Terra 250 m imagery. After smoothing to remove noise and cloud influence, it is subjected to temporal autocorrelation analysis, and its level of significance is the adopted objective function. In addition, NDVI composites are created at various temporal resolutions and compared using qualitative criteria. Results indicate that the proposed optimum temporal resolution is different for managed and natural vegetation. Finally, quality assessment of the multi-temporal NDVI composites reveals that compositing at the proposed optimum temporal resolution could derive products that are useful for operational monitoring of vegetation.

This paper reports on a new Earth Observation (EO) research field concerning the potential use of space remote sensing for the assessment of crop damage at the field level. Digital field (cadastral) maps were used in order to overcome the problem of poor field boundary distinction (due to the current spatial resolution, small field size, a hilly landscape and the homogeneity of the area cover) and to estimate damage at field level. The relationship between crop damage estimations made by field observations and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data was studied. By transforming the cadastral (field) map into a GRID format containing cells of one metre square (ArcView, Spatial Analyst), it was possible to determine the number of cells overlaying pixels or part of pixels only within the field area and the corresponding mean NDVI value. Various techniques, including Supervised Classification and Regression Models, were applied in order to study the correlation between NDVI values and those estimat...