Publication Date:
2011-08-24
Description:
This research attempts to map small-scale vegetation changes in Mexico. Forty-eight weeks of coarse resolution Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a digitized climax vegetation map, land cover samples from space shuttle photographs and actual vegetation samples were used as inputs. Principal components analyses and a clustering algorithm were applied to the NDVI data to generate a single layer that was stratified by the climax vegetation zones map. The purpose is to create a new layer that differentiates climax vegetation (hypothesized potential vegetation) from non-climax vegetation land covers. One of the keys to developing a present-day vegetation map was differentiating intrazone land covers based on the stratification; as great as 75% of the sampled land cover types differed from the climax vegetation. The present-day vegetation map achieved 80% classification accuracy when calculated from available ground reference data. About 55% of the temperate zones and 37% of the tropical zones were found to contain original climax vegetation. Most changes coincide with areas of major agricultural activity.
Keywords:
EARTH RESOURCES AND REMOTE SENSING
Type:
Geocarto (ISSN 1010-6049); 8; 4; p. 73-85
Format:
text
