APPLYING SATELLITE IMAGERY TO TRIAGE ASSESSMENT OF ECOSSYTEM HEALTH

摘要

Considerable evidence documents that certain changes in vegetation and soils result in irreversible degraded rangeland ecosystems. We used Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) imagery to develop calibration patterns of change in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) over the growing season for selected sites for which we had ground tdata and historical data characterizing these sites as irreversible degraded. We used the NDVI curves for these training sites to calssify and map the irreversibly degraded rangelands in southern New Mexico.