Estimating vegetation cover in an urban environment based on Landsat ETM+ imagery: A case study in Phoenix, USA

• Published in: International journal of remote sensing Vol. 28; no. 2; pp. 269 - 291
• Main Authors: Buyantuyev, A., Wu, J., Gries, C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Taylor & Francis 01-01-2007; Taylor and Francis
• Subjects: Animal, plant and microbial ecology; Applied geophysics; Biological and medical sciences; Earth sciences; Earth, ocean, space; Exact sciences and technology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; General aspects. Techniques; Internal geophysics; Landsat ETM; Linear spectral mixture analysis; Regression analysis; Teledetection and vegetation maps; Urban; Vegetation index; United States; Arizona; Site; data; Vegetation index; urban environment; stratification; vegetation; case studies; Computing; North America; Modeling; Mixture; agriculture; ecology; land use; imagery; Plant cover; land cover; Ecological abundance; Space remote sensing; Landsat; least-squares; urban areas; Long term; Landsat satellite; Southwest; Regression model; ecosystems
• ISSN: 0143-1161; 1366-5901
• DOI: 10.1080/01431160600658149

Studies of urban ecological systems can be greatly enhanced by combining ecosystem modelling and remote sensing which often requires establishing statistical relationships between field and remote sensing data. At the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAPLTER) site in the south-western USA, we estimated vegetation abundance from Landsat ETM+ acquired at three dates by computing vegetation indices (NDVI and SAVI) and conducting linear spectral mixture analysis (SMA). Our analyses were stratified by three major land use/land covers-urban, agricultural, and desert. SMA, which provides direct measures of vegetation end member fraction for each pixel, was directly compared with field data and with the independent accuracy assessment dataset constructed from air photos. Vegetation index images with highest correlation with field data were used to construct regression models whose predictions were validated with the accuracy assessment dataset. We also investigated alternative regression methods, recognizing the inadequacy of traditional Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) in biophysical remote sensing. Symmetrical regressions-reduced major axis (RMA) and bisector ordinary least squares (OLS
bisector
)-were evaluated and compared with OLS. Our results indicated that SMA was a more accurate approach to vegetation quantification in urban and agricultural land uses, but had a poor accuracy when applied to desert vegetation. Potential sources of errors and some improvement recommendations are discussed.