Researchers made progress in the evaluation of vegetation dynamic remote sensing products in High Mountain Asia

In ecological transition zones with sparse vegetation ecosystems, vegetation is known to be sensitive to climate change and has strong feedback. Despite these advances in technology, satellite-extracted vegetation indices should still be treated with caution for different datasets may be affected by the sensors themselves and atmospheric conditions.

Researchers from Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, evaluated the three widely used remote sensing data sets of GIMMS, MODIS and SPOT.

The results indicate that the consistent greening pixels mainly distributed in central TP stretching to the northeastern part, and in western stretching to eastern TS, account for 32.14%, while 8.32% of consistent browning pixels are concentrated in southwestern TP and central TS. The inconsistent pixels account for 59.54%, with 39.21% of inconsistent greening pixels being widely distributed across HMA, and 20.58% of inconsistent browning pixels being relatively pronounced in central TS and southern TP.

Relevant achievements are published in Remote Sensing of Environment under the title of “Evaluation of consistency among three NDVI products applied to High Mountain Asia in 2000-2015”.