Remote Sensing Methods

Remote sensing methods are manipulations or analysis of image data that comes from one or more . From the perspective of rangeland management, the goal of a remote sensing method is to extract information that is directly related to a management question or to create additional data layers that are correlated to what you’re ultimately interested in. It is common to employ several different remote sensing steps en route to getting the information needed to meet a management objective. To help people connect the dots, we are developing workflows to explain how a method can be used in conjunction with other methods and suggest process chains of different methods that have successfully been used in combination to answer rangeland management questions.

This list below contains some of the most commonly used remote sensing methods but is not comprehensive. We will continue to add to this list over time, but if you are looking for information on a method that is not listed below, or if you are familiar with a method and would like to contribute to an abstract, please contact us.

3 Dimensional Modeling

• Digital Photogrammetry

Vegetation/Greenness Indices

• NDVI – Normalized Difference Vegetation Index
• EVI – Enhanced Vegetation Index
• SAVI – Soil-adjusted Vegetation Index
• MSAVI – Modified Soil-adjusted Vegetation Index
• SATVI – Soil-adjusted Total Vegetation Index
• Microwave Vegetation Index
• Normalized Burn Ratio
• Biological Crust Index
• Burned Area Reflectance Classification(BARC) (BARC)

Biophysical Parameter Estimates

• fPAR – Fraction of Photosynthetically Active Radiation
• Fractional Cover
• NPP – Net Primary Productivity or biomass
• Leaf-area Index

Classification Techniques

• Unsupervised Classification
• Supervised Classification
• Object-based Classification – also called Object-based image analysis (OBIA)
• Random Forests
• Target Detection/Extraction
• Spectral Mixture Analysis
• Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis
• Wavelet Analysis
• Change Detection

Data Transformations/Enhancement Techniques

• Canopy/Texture Mapping
• Tasseled-cap Transformation
• Principal Components Analysis

Spatial Prediction Techniques

Thermal Remote Sensing Products

• Fire anomalies
• Surface Temperature

Riparian Valley Bottom Mapping

• Valley Bottom Mapping Tool
• RSAC Riparian Mapping Tool
• Land Facet Corridor Tool
• Buffers

Riparian Vegetation Mapping

• Vegetation Mapping Prerequisites and Approaches
• Image Interpretation
• Riparian Unsupervised Classification
• Riparian Supervised Classification
• Classification and Regression Tree (CART)

Inventorying Riparian Areas

• Inventorying Riparian areas using Nested Area Frame Sampling