Cost-effectiveness of vegetation biophysical parameters retrieval fromremote sensing data

摘要

In the context of vegetation studies Earth Observation (E.O.) data have been extensively used to retrieve biophysical parameters of land surface. In some cases, thanks to the availability of near-real-time data, tools and applications have been developed and implemented in the fields of precision agriculture, water resources monitoring and management. So far, empirical approaches based on vegetation indices (Vis) have been successfully applied. They may provide a satisfactory level of accuracy in theestimation of important vegetation biophysical parameters (e.g. LAI, fractional ground cover, biomass, etc). Such methods, however, require a reliable reference data-set to calibrate empirical formulas on different vegetation types; furthermore, they are generally based on a few spectral bands, with a consistent under-exploitation of the full spectral range available in new generation sensors. Alternative approaches based on inversion of radiative transfer models of vegetation represent a challenging opportunity for the estimation of vegetation parameters from data with high dimensionality.