Vegetation canopy PAR absorptance and NDVI: An assessment for ten tree species with the SAIL model

The relation between the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the fraction of absorbed photo-synthetically active radiation (f(APAR)) was examined for ten different forest types by using the scattering-from-arbitrarily-inclined-leaves (SAIL) radiative transfer model. Leaf reflectance and transmittance, twig reflectance, and background reflectance data were collected as part of field experiments whose sites contain species whose ranges cover a significant part of western and northern North America. This provides a sense of variations that occur at continental scales. Actual backgrounds of forests include litter and mosses; these materials did not fall along a soil line in red-near infrared reflectance space. The simulations indicated that, at low values of the leaf area index (LAI), the background reflectance had a significant effect on the canopy reflectance, although little effect on photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) absorption. At higher values of LAI, leaf optical properties were the factors that dominated canopy reflectance and NDVI. Variations in canopy reflectance due to leaf optical properties were large, but most species had similar reflectance patterns. Green leaf optical properties, among the species studied, had little effect on f(APAR). The presence of twigs in the canopy had a noticeable effect on canopy reflectance and absorption of PAR, but these effects were secondary to the effects of background and leaf optical properties. (C) Elsevier Science Inc.