Study on the Relationship between the Forest Canopy Closure and Hyperspectral Signatures

Forest canopy density is an ideal representative of the forest habitat situations. It can directly or indirectly depict the canopy structure and gap size in the forestland, thus could be applied to assessment of wildlife’s diversit y. Since population survey of vegetation and wildlife diversities is a key issue for sustainable forest ecosystem management, many research efforts have been focused on forest canopy density using multispectral data in the last two decades. Unfortunately, prediction of canopy density using large scaling remote sensing data remains a challenging issue. Due to recent advances in hyperspectral image sensors hyperspectral imagery is now available for environmental monitoring. In this paper, we conduct experiments to monitor complicated environments of forestland that can be captured by using hyperspectral imagery and further be analyzed to test a prediction model of forest canopy density. The results show that 95% of canopy density could be well described by using 2 difference vegetation indices (DVIs), which are difference of blue and green reflectances rband_100-rband_150 and difference of 2 short wave infrared reflectancse rband_406-rband_410 With the wavelengths of band no. 100, 150, 406, and 410 specified by 462.39 nm, 534.40 nm, 918.22 nm and 924.41 nm respectively.