Capturing the spatiotemporal variations in the gross primary productivity in coastal wetlands by integrating eddy covariance, Landsat, and MODIS satellite data: A case study in the Yangtze Estuary, China

Accurate monitoring of the spatiotemporal variations in the gross primary productivity (GPP) in coastal wetlands is essential for blue carbon quantification. However, the currently available moderate-spatial-resolution GPP algorithms and products may contain large uncertainties and may rarely meet the demands of tidal wetland research. In this paper, we examine two statistical methods, namely, simple linear regression and random forest regression, to capture the high spatial resolution GPP variations in the salt marshes in the Yangtze Estuary by integrating multi-source data, including eddy covariance, Landsat, and Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite data. The satellite-derived photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), enhanced vegetation index (EVI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and normalized difference water index (NDWI) are used individually and in different combinations to drive the two statistical methods and investigate their performances in estimating the GPP. The results show that together with the PAR, the EVI generally has the greatest potential for GPP estimation (R2 > 0.75, RMSE