Estimating fractional vegetation cover in the Wenchuan earthquake disaster area using high-resolution airborne image and Landsat TM image

摘要

The fractional vegetation cover (Fvc) can be characterized by strong temporal dynamics that need to be considered for environmental recovery assessment in the Wenchuan earthquake disaster area. This study is to test the capacity of satellite remote sensing images in estimating fractional vegetation cover in the Sichuan disaster area. Two different spectral mixture analysis methods including N~* and N~*2 transformed from NDVI are applied for fractional vegetation cover estimation using Landsat TM image. High-resolution fractional vegetation cover production from airborne images is used for validation. The result shows that N~* has the non linear relationship with airborne fractional vegetation cover values in this study area and N~*2 takes a better performance (R~2=0.993). In total, retrieved Fvc values from Landsat TM image have a strong relationship to those from airborne image, and can be used in environmental dynamics assessment in the Wenchuan Earthquake disaster area.