Identification and mapping of natural vegetation are major issues for biodiversity management and conservation. Remotely sensed data with very high spatial resolution are currently used to study vegetation, but most satellite sensors are limited to four spectral bands, which is insufficient to identify some natural vegetation formations. The study objectives are to discriminate natural vegetati...

BACKGROUND High fidelity carbon mapping has the potential to greatly advance national resource management and to encourage international action toward climate change mitigation. However, carbon inventories based on field plots alone cannot capture the heterogeneity of carbon stocks, and thus remote sensing-assisted approaches are critically important to carbon mapping at regional to global scal...

A study was carried out to investigate the utility of airborne hyperspectral and satellite L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data for estimating fractional coverages of herbaceous, coastal scrub, and bare ground cover types on the central California coast. Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) imagery collected in September of 2008 and Phased Array L-band SAR (PALSAR) (HH-...

Fire risk is a major threat to life, property and natural resources in southern California. Recent fire disasters occurred in autumn 2003 and 2007. Fire risk management deals with these hazards, input data are collected, analyzed and evaluated. One of the most important input data is the vegetation density in the endangered areas. Here we describe methods to map vegetation density forming five ...

As the barren lands play a key role in the interaction between land cover dynamics and climate system, an efficient methodology for the global-scale extraction and mapping of the barren lands is important. The discriminative potential of the existing soil/bareness indexes was assessed by collecting globally distributed reference data belonging to major land cover types. The existing soil/barene...

Summary The study presents a comparative analysis of eight Vegetation Indices (VIs) used to examine vegetation greenness over the northern coasts Iceland. geographical extent area is set by coordinates two fjords, Eyjafjörður and Skagafjörður, notable for their agricultural significance. in Iceland fragile due harsh climate, climate change, overgrazing volcanic activity, which increase soil ero...

Terrestrial Laser Scan (TLS) data are seeing increasing use in geology, geomorphology, forestry and urban mapping. The ease of use, affordability and operational flexibility of TLS suggests that demand for it is likely to increase in large scale mapping studies. However, its advantages may remain restricted to specific environments, due to difficulties in defining bare-ground level in the prese...

Secondary forest succession on abandoned agricultural land has played a significant role in land cover changes in Europe over the past several decades. However, it is difficult to quantify over large areas. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for mapping forest succession patterns using vegetation structure information derived from LiDAR data supported by national topographic vecto...

Monitoring and tracking vegetation changes in vast and remote areas is a difficult task. Accurate extraction of existing vegetation is the primary step for better statistical assessment. An approach for vegetation mapping is proposed which automatically explores spectral characteristics of connected components in an image. Different frames of multi-spectral Indian Remote sensing IRS-1C LISS III...

Wetlands are an important natural resource that requires monitoring. A key step in environmental monitoring is to map the locations and characteristics of the resource to better enable assessment of change over time. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems are helpful in this way for wetland resources because their data can be used to map and monitor changes in surface water extent, saturated so...