Management of crop residues is an important consideration for reducing soil erosion and increasing soil organic carbon. Current methods of measuring residue cover are inadequate for characterizing the spatial variability of residue cover over large fields. The objectives of this research were to determine the spectral reflectance of crop residues and soils and to assess the limits of discrimina...

A new moisture adjusted vegetation index (MAVI) is proposed using the red, near infrared, and shortwave infrared (SWIR) reflectance in band-ratio form in this paper. The effectiveness of MAVI in retrieving leaf area index (LAI) is investigated using Landsat-5 data and field LAI measurements in two forest and two grassland areas. The ability of MAVI to retrieve forest LAI under different backgro...

Albedo characterizes the radiometric interface of land surfaces, especially vegetation, and the atmosphere. Albedo is a critical input to many models, such as crop growth models, hydrological models and climate models. For the extensive attention to crop monitoring, a physical albedo model for crops is developed based on the law of energy conservation and spectral invariants, which is derived f...

A two band Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI2) without the blue band reflectance has recently been developed as a proxy for the phenology, quantity, and activity of vegetation. We compared the ability of EVI2 and the more commonly used Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) to resolve differences in surface greenness and Leaf Area Index (LAI) among three sites located along a burn severity ...

Introduction: It has been theorized that the effects of space weathering during soil formation on the Moon are similar to those for many other airless bodies (e.g., Vesta, Eros) [1,2]. Therefore, the study of these effects on lunar soils may form the basis for our understanding of other heavenly bodies. This is a particularly valid axiom for reflectance spectroscopy of these soils. It has been ...

Visible-near infrared diffuse reflectance (vis-NIR) spectroscopy is a fast, nondestructive technique well suited for analyses of some of the essential constituents of the soil. These constituents, mainly clay minerals, organic matter and soil water strongly affect conditions for plant growth and influence plant nutrition. Here we describe the process by which vis-NIR spectroscopy can be used to...

The Spectranomics approach to tropical forest remote sensing has established a link between foliar reflectance spectra and the phylogenetic composition of tropical canopy tree communities vis-à-vis the taxonomic organization of biochemical trait variation. However, a direct relationship between phylogenetic affiliation and foliar reflectance spectra of species has not been established. We sough...

[1] We evaluate the effect and importance of a ground truth correction for the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M) level 2 (reflectance) data set. This correction is derived from extensive laboratory characterizations of mature feldspathic lunar soils and is designed to improve the accuracy of 1mm absorption features in M reflectance data. To evaluate the correction, the band strength across a subset of...

We have used Landsat-5 TM and Landsat-7 ETM+ images together with simultaneous ground-truth data at sample points in the Doñana marshes to predict water turbidity and depth from band reflectance using Generalized Additive Models. We have point samples for 12 different dates simultaneous with 7 Landsat-5 and 5 Landsat-7 overpasses. The best model for water turbidity in the marsh explained 38% of...

Introduction: We report Modified gaussian model (MGM) deconvolution analyses [2] of reflectance spectrum of the Yamato (Y) 981031. Petrological characteristics of Y981031 had already reported [1]. Absorption features derived from the MGM deconvo-lution are compared with the petrological characteristics of Y981031, and implication of the absorption features are discussed. Finally, we propose sou...