Imaging spectrometry and vegetation science

Abstract

Remote sensing is increasingly used for measurements required for accurate determinations of the landscape and the state of agricultural and forested land. With the deployment of early broadband sensors there was a lot of enthusiasm as data, which was previously not feasible to obtain, was now regularly available for large areas of the earth. For the first time vegetation mapping could be undertaken on a large (coarse) scale and the data updated regularly. However, new technologies have shown that while data obtained from broadband sensors have been useful in many respects, they also have their limitations. Because of their limited number of channels and wide bandwidths, a lot of the data about plant reflectance is lost due to averaging.