Exploitation of spatial information in high resolution digital imagery to map leaf area index

Crop responses to management practices and the environment, as quantified by leaf area index (LAI), provide decision-making criteria for the delineation of crop management zones. The objective of this work was to investigate whether spatial correlations inferred from remotely sensed imagery can be used to interpolate and map LAI using a relatively small number of ground-based LAI measurements. Airborne imagery was recorded with the Airborne Imaging Spectrometer for Applications (AISA) radiometer over a 3.2 ha corn field. Spectral vegetation indexes (SVI) were derived from the image and aggregated to cells of 2 x 2 m², 4 x 4 m², and 8 x 8 m² resolution. The residual maximum likelihood method was used to estimate the LAI variogram parameters. A generalized least squares regression was used to relate ground truth LAI data and collocated image pixels. This regression result was then used to convert variograms from the imagery to LAI units as well as to interpolate and map LAI. The decrease in resolution by merging pixels led to an increase in the value of the r ² and to a decrease in root mean-squared error (RMSE) values. The accuracy of kriged estimates from the variogram of the measured LAI and that from the image derived variograms was estimated by cross-validation. There was no difference in the accuracy of the estimates using either variograms from measured LAI values or from those of converted SVIs. Maps of LAI from ground-based measurements made by kriging the data with image-derived variogram parameters were similar to those obtained by with kriging with the variogram of measured LAI. Similar coarse spatial trends of high, medium and low LAI were evident for both maps. Variogram parameters from ground-based measurements of LAI compared favorably with those derived from remotely sensed imagery and could be used to provide reasonable results for the interpolation of LAI measurements.