Session Information
| Session | Poster Session | | Date | Monday (2008-04-07) | | Time | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM | | Room | Grand Terrace |
Presentation Information
| Presenter | Nan Lu | | Title | Predicting land surface properties based on land cover heterogeneity at the regional scale: a case study in the semiarid Inner Mongolia | | Affiliation | University of Toledo | | Authors | Nan Lu, Ranjeet John, Jiquan Chen | | Keywords | Ecoregion, EVI, Heterogeneity, Inner Mongolia, LSWI | | Presentation Type | Poster | Abstract:
To explain the spatial variation of land surface properties, such as surface water status and productivity, is one of the major tasks in landscape ecology today. In this study, we first generated a grid over the Inner Mongolia region with a spatial resolution of 28 km, corresponding to that of the AMSR-E (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observation System) surface soil moisture images. Then we calculated the Shannon diversity index (H’) of land cover based on the MODIS derived IGBP classification, mean and standard deviation of enhanced vegetation index (EVI) and land surface water index (LSWI) derived from MODIS within each of the grid. We examined the empirical relationships between H’ and surface soil moisture (Ms, kg m-2), EVI and LSWI for the entire region of Inner Mongolia and its three major ecoregions (forest, grassland and desert), separately. We hypothesized that Ms, EVI and LSWI would increase with the increase of the land cover heterogeneity; and the correlations may vary among ecoregions. We found that in the main growing season Ms was positively correlated with H’ (R2=0.16, p<.0001) only in the desert ecoregion. EVI and LSWI were significantly correlated with H’ in the entire region and all the ecoregions; however, the standard deviation of EVI and LSWI only showed positive correlations with H’ in the desert and grassland ecoregions. The results demonstrate that land cover heterogeneity could help explain the spatial variation of surface moisture and productivity in the semiarid Inner Mongolia. |
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