MODIS-Landsat Data Fusion for Estimating Vegetation Dynamics – A Case Study for Two Ranches in Southwestern Texas

Remote sensing has been widely used in vegetation-dynamics monitoring. Many studies have used data acquired by multispectral sensors, such as the Landsat TM sensor, due to their high spatial resolution (30 m). However, during the growing season, the temporal resolution (16 day) cannot capture rapid changes of vegetation. Meanwhile, coarse-spectral-resolution sensors, such as Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), have high-frequency temporal information that can catch the details of landscape changes. In this research, we proposed a data-fusion approach that lead us to merge the MODIS and Landsat TM data to create a dataset of vegetation dynamics with both a high spatial resolution and a fine temporal resolution. The Comanche and Faith Ranches, located in west Texas, were chosen for this study. The MODIS product was used as a regionally consistent reference dataset to correct the Landsat imagery. Based on this new dataset, NDVI time-series curves from 2004 to 2011 were calculated with the MODIS 13 Vegetation Dataset. One random sample of red-band images was tested and compared with MODIS data. A high correlation coefficient 0.907 and RMSE 0.0245 was found.