Review of optical-based remote sensing for plant trait mapping

By Lucie Homolová, Z. Malenovsky, Jan G. P. W. Clevers, G. García-Santos. 2013

427 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A B S T R A C T Plant trait data have been used in various studies related to ecosystem functioning, community ecology, and assessment of ecosystem services. Evidences are that plant scientists agree on a set of key plant traits, which are relatively easy to measure and have a stable and strong predictive response to ecosystem functions. However, the field measurements of plant trait data are still limited to small area, to a certain moment in time and to certain number of species only. Therefore, remote sensing (RS) offers potential to complement or even replace field measurements of some plant traits. It offers instantaneous spatially contiguous information, covers larger areas and in case of satellite observations profits from their revisit capacity. In this review, we first introduce RS concepts of light–vegetation interactions, RS instruments for vegetation studies, RS methods, and scaling between field and RS observations. Further we discuss in detail current achievements and challenges of optical RS for mapping of key plant traits. We concentrate our discussion on three categorical plant traits (plant growth and life forms, flammability properties and photosynthetic pathways and activity) and on five continuous plant traits (plant height, leaf phenology, leaf mass per area, nitrogen and phosphorous concentration or content). We review existing literature to determine the retrieval accuracy of the continuous plant traits. The relative estimation error using RS ranged between 10% and 45% of measured mean value, i.e. around 10% for plant height of tall canopies, 20% for plant height of short canopies, 15% for plant nitrogen, 25% for plant phosphorus content/ concentration, and 45% for leaf mass per area estimates.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e3e0d7b449782e11801e649b5f10d1c7ecce4949

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Citations in the corpus

Synthesis and future research directions linking tree diversity to growth, survival, and damage in a global network of tree diversity experiments (2018, background): “elling approaches, are at the forefront of a rapidly evolving field of research creating novel opportunities for the quantification of key canopy traits (Asner et al., 2017; Cavender-Bares et al., 2017; Homolová et al., 2013).”
Framing the concept of satellite remote sensing essential biodiversity variables: challenges and future directions (2016, background): “For example, several suggestions have been made to measure plant traits from space (Homolova et al. 2013), but both a coherent approach and agreed semantics (e.”
PROSPECT-PRO for estimating content of nitrogen-containing leaf proteins and other carbon-based constituents (2020, background): “…(Baret et al., 2007; Clevers and Kooistra, 2012; Vos and Bom, 1993; Yoder and Pettigrew-Crosby, 1995), this relationship does not hold during their senescence and does not appear to be universal, as it is relatively weak across species and ecosystems (Asner and Martin, 2009; Homolová et al., 2013).”
Remote Sensing for Precision Agriculture: Sentinel-2 Improved Features and Applications (2020, background): “[27], on the matching of ecological, agricultural, and remote sensing scales, we currently find that on the basis of individual plants, plant communities, and agroecosystems, different remote sensing technologies may provide coverage across canopy and landscape scales.”