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Spectral and Structural Measures of Northwest Forest Vegetation at Leaf to Landscape Scales

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Abstract

We report a multiscale study in the Wind River Valley in southwestern Washington, where we quantified leaf to stand scale variation in spectral reflectance for dominant species. Four remotely sensed structural measures, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), cover fractions from spectral mixture analysis (SMA), equivalent water thickness (EWT), and albedo were investigated using Airborne Visible Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) data. Discrimination of plant species varied with wavelength and scale, with deciduous species showing greater separability than conifers. Contrary to expectations, plant species were most distinct at the branch scale and least distinct at the stand scale. At the stand scale, broadleaf and conifer species were spectrally distinct, as were most conifer age classes. Intermediate separability occurred at the leaf scale. Reflectance decreased from leaf to stand scales except in the broadleaf species, which peaked in near-infrared reflectance at the branch scale. Important biochemical signatures became more pronounced spectrally progressing from leaf to stand scales. Recent regenerated clear-cuts (less than 10 years old) had the highest albedo and nonphotosynthetic vegetation (NPV). After 50 years, the stands showed significant decreases in albedo, NPV, and EWT and increases in shade. Albedo was lowest in old-growth forests. Peak EWT, a proxy measure for leaf area index (LAI), was observed in 11- to 30-year-old stands. When compared to LAI, EWT and NDVI showed exponentially decreasing, but distinctly different, relationships with increasing LAI. This difference is biologically important: at 95% of the maximum predicted NDVI and EWT, LAI was 5.17 and 9.08, respectively. Although these results confirm the stand structural variation expected with forest succession, remote-sensing images also provide a spatial context and establish a basis to evaluate variance within and between age classes. Landscape heterogeneity can thus be characterized over large areas—a critical and important step in scaling fluxes from stand-based towers to larger scales.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Jeff Dozier for the loan of an ASD spectrometer for the 1999 field campaign, Edward Collins for Modtran simulations used for albedo calculations, Dr. David Shaw for collecting the nonvascular epiphytes from the WRCCRF, and George J. Scheer for measuring the epiphyte spectra. AVIRIS data used in this study were supplied by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which also supplied an ASD field spectrometer in 1996. Access to the WRCCRF was kindly supplied by the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest station, which also facilitated research in the area. Funding for this research was supported by the Office of Science (BER), US Department of Energy, through the Western Regional Center of the National Institute for Global Environmental Change under cooperative agreement no. DE-FC03-90ER61010. Finally, we thank two independent reviewers and Dr. Steven Seagle for helpful comments on the manuscript. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the DOE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, EH3611, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, 93106, USA

    Dar A. Roberts & Segun Ogunjemiyo

  2. Department of Air, Land, and Water Resources, University of California, Davis, California, 95616, USA

    Susan L. Ustin, Jonathan Greenberg & Solomon Z. Dobrowski

  3. Department of Earth, Ecological, and Environmental Sciences, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio 43606, USA

    Jiquan Chen

  4. College of Forest Resources, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA

    Thomas M. Hinckley

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  1. Dar A. Roberts
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Roberts, D., Ustin, S., Ogunjemiyo, S. et al. Spectral and Structural Measures of Northwest Forest Vegetation at Leaf to Landscape Scales. Ecosystems 7, 545–562 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-004-0144-5

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