Decomposition of vegetation cover into woody and herbaceous components using AVHRR NDVI time series

A method is developed to separate Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) time series data into contributions from woody (perennial) and herbaceous (annual) vegetation, and thereby to infer their separate leaf area indices and cover fractions. The method is formally consistent with fundamental linearity requirements for such a decomposition, and is capable of rejecting contaminated NDVI data. In this study, estimates of annual averaged woody cover and monthly averaged herbaceous cover over Australia are determined using Pathfinder AVHRR Land series (PAL) Global Area Coverage (GAC) Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) NDVI data from 1981 to 1994, together with ground-based measurements of leaf area index (LAI) and foliage projective cover (FPC).