Investigation of aggregation effects in vegetation condition monitoring at a national scale

Monitoring vegetation condition is an important issue in the Mediterranean region, in terms of both securing food and preventing fires. Vegetation indices (VIs), mathematical transformations of reflectance bands, have played an important role in vegetation monitoring, as they depict the abundance and health of vegetation. Instead of storing raster VI maps, aggregated statistics can be derived and used in long-term monitoring. The aggregation schemes (zonations) used in Greece are the forest service units, the fire service units and the administrative units. The purpose of this work was to explore the effect of the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) in vegetation condition monitoring at the above mentioned aggregation schemes using 16day Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) composites acquired by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) satellite sensor. The effects of aggregation in the context of MAUP were examined by analyzing variance, from which the amo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: GIS
• Authors: T. K. Alexandridis, T. Katagis, I. Z. Gitas, N. G. Silleos, K. M. Eskridge, G. Gritzas
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, GIS 2010, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, Service Units, Vegetation Condition