Assessing Water Stress of Desert Tamarugo Trees Using in situ Data and Very High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing

Remote Sensing

Roberto O. Chávez¹  Jan G. P. W. Clevers¹  Martin Herold¹  Edmundo Acevedo² 

[1] Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands; E-Mails:;Laboratorio de Relación Suelo-Agua-Planta, Facultad de Ciencias Agronómicas, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 1004, Santiago, Chile; E-Mail:

关键词: arid ecosystems;    water stress;    groundwater depletion;    LAI;    green canopy fraction;    satellite images;    vegetation indices;    pulvinar movement;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs5105064

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The hyper-arid Atacama Desert is one of the most extreme environments for life and only few species have evolved to survive its aridness. One such species is the tree Prosopis tamarugo Phil. Because Tamarugo completely depends on groundwater, it is being threatened by the high water demand from the Chilean mining industry and the human consumption. In this paper, we identified the most important biophysical variables to assess the water status of Tamarugo trees and tested the potential of WorldView2 satellite images to retrieve these variables. We propose green canopy fraction (GCF) and green drip line leaf area index (DLLAI_green) as best variables and a value of 0.25 GCF as a critical threshold for Tamarugo survival. Using the WorldView2 spectral bands and an object-based image analysis, we showed that the NDVI and the Red-edge Chlorophyll Index (CI_Red-edge) have good potential to retrieve GCF and DLLAI_green. The NDVI performed best for DLLAI_green (RMSE = 0.4) while the CI_Red-edge was best for GCF (RMSE = 0.1). However, both indices were affected by Tamarugo leaf movements (leaves avoid facing direct solar radiation at the hottest time of the day). Thus, monitoring systems based on these indices should consider the time of the day and the season of the year at which the satellite images are acquired.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland