Quantifying NDVI Cross-Scale Relationship using Spatial Autocorrelation

The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is an important parameter frequently used to characterize the land surface using remotely sensed satellite imagery. Because of the heterogeneity of the land surface, pixel-wise NDVI derived from coarse resolution sensors may induce errors or uncertainty. Several studies have investigated the spatial scale dependencies of NDVI in different approaches without consensus. This paper aims to quantify the crossscale relationship of NDVI using some indictors describing spatial heterogeneity. Experiment results showed that Geary´s c and scale ratio are the best two indictors, with the assistant of which an empirical model was then built describing the cross-scale relationship of NDVI.