Evaluation of the saturation property of vegetation indices derived from sentinel-2 in mixed crop-forest ecosystem

Abstract

Abstract The saturation property of vegetation indices posed a known limitation and this study was motivated to understand the saturation property of three widely used vegetation indices in mixed crop-forest ecosystem where limited knowledge existed. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Simple Ratio Index (SRI) and Transformed Vegetation Index (TVI) were computed from sentinel-2 bands and; variations among bands and among vegetation indices were evaluated. The study employed green Leaf Area Index (gLAI) Version 1 product, derived from PROBA-V daily data for discriminating the saturation property of the indices. Although the study applied various methods of image preprocessing and processing, best curve fitting and correlation analysis were the key ones. The three vegetation indices: NDVI, SRI, and TVI computed from sentinel-2 bands: four (red) and five (red edge) coupled with bands 8 and 8a showed some levels of saturation. Nonetheless, TVI computed from bands 8a and 4 is the best outperforming combination, i.e., the least saturated one and it is an interesting output in a sense that a single index with significantly lower values of noise equivalent green Leaf Area Index as well as having strong association with gLAI is obtained that could be very useful for quantification of gLAI in similar ecosystems. For the rest of the bands and vegetation indices combination of the indices via setting thresholds could be one possible solution.