K3: Oral Presentation C Thursday, 4:30 – 5:00 pm C Gooseberry Falls Room

Regional Vegetation Condition Analysis Based on AVHRR NDVI Temporal Profiles

Liang Guo, Marvin Bauer
University of Minnesota
Department of Forest Resources
Remote Sensing and Geospatial Analysis Laboratory
115 Green Hall
1530 Cleveland Avenue North
St. Paul, MN  55108
guox0047@tc.umn.edu

Eleven years of bi-weekly 1 km resolution AVHRR/Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) satellite data of the Great Lakes region has been compiled at the University of Minnesota through the Upper Midwest RESAC project. The purpose of this database is to provide a regional geospatial historical record of vegetation condition characterizing variation between 1990-2001 (including the average green up, brown down, maximum and minimum “greenness”, and regional biomass yields for each year). This is done by compiling “temporal profiles,” or quantitative composites of several months of bi-weekly data after quality enhancement processing (Fourier adjustment and median filter). Then a heuristic model is built to evaluate vegetation condition by using the temporal profile metrics and comparing the results to the corresponding years weather condition and agriculture data, attempting to find the qualitative or quantitative correlation between them. MapServer technology has been used to build a vegetation cover.