Author
CHOPPING, MARK - MONTCLAIR STATE UNIV | |
LALIBERTE, ANDREA - 6235-15-00 POST-DOC | |
Rango, Albert |
Submitted to: Ecological Society of America Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings Publication Acceptance Date: 4/30/2004 Publication Date: N/A Citation: N/A Interpretive Summary: Interpretive summary not required. Technical Abstract: This study reports on work to assess the utility of multi-angle data in providing measures of the physical structure and composition of desert grasslands. The target is in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Jornada Experimental Range (JER), Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA. The JER is a CHRIS/Proba Core Site. The approaches followed include multi-angle image ratios, bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) model inversion - Li-Ross kernel-driven and the nonlinear simple geometric model (SGM) - and the structural scattering index (SSI). The data used are from the Compact High-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS) flown on the European Space Agency's Project for On-Board Autonomy (Proba) satellite launched on October 22, 2001, into a sunsynchronous, elliptical, low Earth orbit. The results indicate that there is canopy structure information in angular ratio images where spatial variation corresponds with mean plant size. The SSI did not behave as expected with high values corresponding to sparsely vegetated areas. SGM fits to data were good (mode RMSE < 0.01) and produced mostly reasonable parameter values with meaningful spatial distributions. |