Procedure for the regional scale mapping of FVC and LAI over land degradated areas in the DeSurvey project

The aim of this work is to analyze the consistency of the FVC and LAI regional scale mapping products derived from new generation of sensor systems, SPOT/VEGETATION and MSG/SEVIRI, for vegetation monitoring, especially over hot spot areas affected by land degradation processes. The FVC has been developed from a probabilistic Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA) using as input the nadir-zenith normalized TOC reflectance coefficient (k₀) for the different spectral channels. In this sense, using k₀ as input accounts for the different acquisition geometry in the data. FVC is subsequently used to estimate LAI using the Roujean and Lacaze semi-empirical relationship. The results have demonstrated the competitiveness of the FVC and LAI derived products regarding similar satellite products at local scales and the suitability of using them to reproduce the temporal variability over dryland condition areas.