Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Utah
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

For this project, in collaboration with Utah State University, we are proposing to derive daily normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data from 2000 – 2014. NDVI is a satellite-derived metric of the reflectance of photosynthetic biomass. NDVI is available through terraPulse at daily, 500-m resolution from atmospherically corrected estimates of red and near-infrared surface reflectance from the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors aboard the NASA Aqua and Terra satellites. Raw measurements are subject to extensive processing, in which data are masked for snow, cloud, and high aerosols and corrected for distortions produced by variation in solar angles. The second phase of the project in year one would entail developing a “proof-of-concept” web based mapping prototype to help visualize the NDVI data for the area of interest. This prototype hosted at terraPulse shall be made available to our collaborators for testing purposes.