Airborne remote sensing of forest leaf area index in mountainous terrain

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Date
2000
Authors
Johnson, Ryan L.
University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science
Journal Title
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Publisher
Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 2000
Abstract
Leaf area index (LAI) provides forestry information that is important for regional scale ecological models and in studies of global change. This research examines the effects of mountainous terrain on the radiometric properties of multispectral CASI imagery in estimating ground-based optical measurements of LAI, obtained using the TRAC and LAI- 2000 systems. Field and image data were acquired summer 1998 in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada. To account for the influence of terrain a new modified approach using the Li and Strahler Geometric Optical Mutual Shadowing (GOMS) model in 'multiple forward mode' (MFM) was developed. This new methodology was evaluated against four traditional radiometric corrections used in comination with spectral mixture analysis (SMA) and NDVI. The MFM approach provided the best overall predictions of LAI measured with ground-based optical instruments, followed by terrain normalized SMA, SMA without terrain normalization and NDVI.
Description
xiv, 151 leaves : ill. (some col.), map ; 29 cm.
Keywords
Forests and forestry -- Alberta -- Kananaskis Region -- Remote sensing , Aerial photography in forestry -- Alberta -- Kananaskis Region , Forest management -- Alberta , Dissertations, Academic
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