ARS | Publication request: ESTIMATING TOTAL RANGELAND VEGETATION BIOMASS WITH LANDSAT IMAGERY 1471

Submitted to: Geospatial Information in Agriculture and Forestry International Conference
Publication Type: Other
Publication Acceptance Date: September 15, 2002
Publication Date: November 30, 2002
Citation: Marsett, R.C., Biedenbender, S.H., Heilman, P., Qi, J., Wallace, O. 2002. Estimating total rangeland vegetation biomass with landsat imagery. Proc. 3rd Internat'l. Conf. on Geospatial Information in Agriculture and Forestry, Nov. 5-7, Denver, CO, Oral Presentation Abstracts.

Technical Abstract: In our efforts to better manage the vast rangelands of the western United States it has become apparent that there is a need for an affordable, accurate, timely and user-friendly method for monitoring forage biomass over large areas. In order to meet this need we have focused our research on using multispectral satellite data to characterize the total standing herbaceous biomass of the rangeland vegetation community. By comparing extensive ground reconnaissance to imagery-derived data and developing new algorithms we have been able to develop a successful means of determining the following; fractional cover of total vegetation within the area of interest, the height of the herbaceous biomass, and the weight of the forage on the ground. The imagery-derived results checked against ground reconnaissance data reveal a high level of accuracy. We are confident that the high level of accuracy will make this objectively derived data useful to the range community. We are continuing to study and improve our methodology for capturing this important information over a variety of vegetation communities ranging from desert scrub to oak and pine woodlands in order to make it available in other geographical locations.