VEGETATION COVER MAPPING OVER FRANCE USING NOAA-11/AVHRR

NOAA-11/AVHRR data from March 1990 to February 1991 have been processed to map the vegetation cover of France with a 4 km spatial resolution. After an automatic cloud detection, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) were computed over the whole period using visible and near-infrared reflectances corrected for atmospheric effects. Monthly NDVI values were obtained for each point of the area by keeping the maximum value. These annual profiles have been classified with a clustering algorithm and the resulting classification has been associated to vegetation cover by comparison with the 1988 vegetation survey from the French Agriculture Department.