The purpose of this study is to investigate plant phenology of riparian forests, grasslands, and chaparral shrub lands along the Santa Clara River. Riparian forests grow along the river and are dominated by winter deciduous cottonwood and willow trees, grasslands grow in open spaces and are predominate dominated by deciduous grasses, and chaparral shrub lands grow in more arid areas and are dominated by evergreen shrubs.
We will explore the vegetation productivity (NDVI), calculate the NDVI throughout the year, summarize the NDVI values within vegetation communities, and visualize the changes in NDVI within vegetation communities.
*Credit: This project is based on materials developed by Chris Kibler
Landsat Operational Land Imager (OLI sensor) which contains 8 pre-processed scenes. The attributes of the scenes are as follows:
Level 2 surface reflectance products
erroneous values were set to NA
Scale factor set to 100
Bands are 2-7
Dates of the scenes are in file name
and
Study sites which are polygons that represent the sites of interest. The attributes are as follows:
"study_site" is a character string with plant type
The data are available in a folder labeled "data" within the repository
Duginski, P. (2020, January 1). At Year's End, Southern California's precipitation remains above normal. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-31/southern-california-precipitation-above-normal-year-end
Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). International Production Assessment Division (IPAD) - Home Page. (n.d.). https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/cropexplorer/Definitions/spotveg.htm
Santa Clara River Research and Restoration. Rivrlab.msi.ucsb.edu. (n.d.). http://rivrlab.msi.ucsb.edu/santa-clara-river