Some Insights on Grassland Health Assessment Based on Remote Sensing

Abstract

Grassland ecosystem is one of the largest ecosystems, which naturally occurs on all continents excluding Antarctica and provides both ecological and economic functions. The deterioration of natural grassland has been attracting many grassland researchers to monitor the grassland condition and dynamics for decades. Remote sensing techniques, which are advanced in dealing with the scale constraints of ecological research and provide temporal information, become a powerful approach of grassland ecosystem monitoring. So far, grassland health monitoring studies have mostly focused on different areas, for example, productivity evaluation, classification, vegetation dynamics, livestock carrying capacity, grazing intensity, natural disaster detecting, fire, climate change, coverage assessment and soil erosion. However, the grassland ecosystem is a complex system which is formed by soil, vegetation, wildlife and atmosphere. Thus, it is time to consider the grassland ecosystem as an entity synthetically and establish an integrated grassland health monitoring system to combine different aspects of the complex grassland ecosystem. In this review, current grassland health monitoring methods, including rangeland health assessment, ecosystem health assessment and grassland monitoring by remote sensing from different aspects, are discussed along with the future directions of grassland health assessment.

A Comparison of the Signal from Diverse Optical Sensors for Monitoring Alpine Grassland Dynamics

“…Grasslands are an important habitat in mountain areas for many plant and animal species, resulting in an increased biodiversity on a regional scale [4,5]. Additionally, grasslands are among the biggest terrestrial carbon sinks and mediums for water storage and purification [2,[6][7][8]. On alpine sites, grassland cover and composition is also important for site or soil stabilization, decreasing the risk of erosion processes.…”

“…In recent years, the amount of studies utilizing the VIs in order to evaluate the similarity of its derivation by different sensors has been steadily increasing [19,27,36]. However, the evaluation of scale for monitoring grassland communities often results in a big issue in research and combining VIs calculated by multiple sensors, such as Sentinel-2 and Phenocams or Spectral Reflectance Sensors (SRS), as they are still not fully explored [6]. Additionally, the synergetic use of diverse sensors detecting in similar spectral ranges has not yet been fully explored.…”

GIS-Based Multicriteria Evaluation of Land Suitability for Grasslands Conservation in Chihuahua, Mexico

“…Grasslands cover about one-third of the world's land area, distributed mainly in semiarid and arid areas [1]. These ecosystems maintain various ecological functions such as water conservation [2], carbon storage [3], and soil stability [4].…”

Does Climate Change or Human Activity Lead to the Degradation in the Grassland Ecosystem in a Mountain-Basin System in an Arid Region of China?

“…The natural soil seed bank plays important role for the regeneration and maintaining the integrity of the plant community [27][28][29]. In regions with grassland degradation, effective activation of the soil seed bank can help to recover the vegetation naturally and reduce the cost of ecological restoration.Many studies [30][31][32] have applied either remote sensing or mathematical statistics to obtain information about the area, coverage, and productivity of the grassland in the hopes of revealing the laws of grassland degradation in arid regions. Against the background of global warming, phenology of vegetation in many parts of the word has altered [33,34].…”

“…Many studies [30][31][32] have applied either remote sensing or mathematical statistics to obtain information about the area, coverage, and productivity of the grassland in the hopes of revealing the laws of grassland degradation in arid regions. Against the background of global warming, phenology of vegetation in many parts of the word has altered [33,34].…”