Relationships of NDVI, Biomass, and Leaf Area Index (LAI) for six key plant species in Barrow, Alaska
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Abstract
Here we investigate relationships between NDVI, Biomass, and Leaf Area Index (LAI) for six key plant species near Barrow, Alaska. We explore how key plant species differ in biomass, leaf area index (LAI) and how can vegetation spectral indices be used to estimate biomass and LAI for key plant species. A vegetation index (VI) or a spectral vegetation index (SVI) is a quantitative predictor of plant biomass or vegetative vigor, usually formed from combinations of several spectral bands, whose values are added, divided, or multiplied in order to yield a single value that indicates the amount or vigor of vegetation. For six key plant species, NDVI was strongly correlated with biomass (R2 = 0.83) and LAI (R2 = 0.70) but showed evidence of saturation above a biomass of 100 g/m2 and an LAI of 2 m2/m2. Extrapolation of a biomass-plant cover model to a multi-decadal time series of plant cover observations suggested that Carex aquatilis and Eriophorum angustifolium decreased in biomass while Arctophila fulva and Dupontia fisheri increased 1972-2008.
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2015. Relationships of NDVI, Biomass, and Leaf Area Index (LAI) for six key plant species in Barrow, Alaska. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e913v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.913v1Author comment
This is a preprint of a manuscript currently under review in a journal.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Santonu Goswami conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables.
John Gamon conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Sergio Vargas performed the experiments.
Craig Tweedie conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Funding
This project was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (ASSP-0421588). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
