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SSF-Svalbard Science Forum

Collecting field validation data for remote sensing-based mapping of the growth season and plant productivity

Awarded: NOK 48,883

Global temperature is increasing, and particularly so in Svalbard. This has strong impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. Sensitive indicators of climate change are the timing of the onset of growth and the annual plant production. Recently a cloud-free time-series of daily Sentinel-2 satellite data covering central parts of Svalbard have been processed. And this dataset has been used in mapping the onset of the growth season. This study aims to strengthen the in-situ phenological validation data in order to map several phenophase (last day with snow, onset of growth, peak of growth and end of growth). A second aim is to collect more field validation data of plant productivity designed to be up-scaled with Sentinel-2 data. And then to map the annual plant growth with Sentinel-2 data. Previous, the onset of growth and a proxy for annual plant productivity have been mapped with MODIS satellite data with 250m pixel resolution. With this new 10m pixel resolution we map these parameters on vegetation type level.

Funding scheme:

SSF-Svalbard Science Forum