干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

The specific focus of this paper is to analyse a time series of the VEGETATION instrument acquired over the desert fringe in the Northern Negev (Israel) during the pilot study phase in 1999. In this region, extended areas of active sand dunes are interfering with loessic deposits and carbonate rocks. In comparison to available Landsat-TM data, hyperspectral imagery and a substantial amount of field recordings, it is shown to which extent the spectral and spatial resolution of the VEGETATION instrument is suited to identify important surface properties, but also to provide estimates of the proportional vegetation cover. The approach is largely based upon the analysis of spectral mixtures which has already proven its suitability to extract sub-pixel information from global monitoring systems.