Vegetation monitoring in rugged terrain with one novel topography — Adjusted vegetation index (TAVI)

Vegetation monitoring with spectral vegetation index (VI) has made great advances over the last several decades, and numerous vegetation indexes have been developed as well. However, the monitoring accuracy with conventional VI in rugged mountains is disturbed some extent by topographic effects. This paper presents one novel topography - adjusted vegetation index (TAVI) to obtain correct vegetation information in rugged area, which is only based on near infrared and red wavebands data of optical remote sensing image, without the digital elevation model (DEM) data. The validation with Landsat TM image shows that the slope of linear regression equation (k) of TAVI and the solar incidence cosine and the correlation coefficient (r) between them are similar to those from NDVI_{ac_tc} (normalized difference vegetation index after atmospheric correction and topographic correction). TAVI achieves good results in rugged mountain vegetation monitoring, especially in resistance to topographic effect in rugged terrain and works well without the support of DEM data, which greatly extends its potentially applicable scope.