Monitoring Spatiotemporal Vegetation Response to Drought Using Remote Sensing Data

Environmental factors such as drought significantly influence vegetation growth, coverage, and ecosystem functions. Hence, monitoring the spatiotemporal vegetation responses to drought in a high temporal and adequate spatial resolution is essential, mainly at the local scale. This study was conducted to investigate the aspatial and spatial relationships between vegetation growth status and drought in the southeastern South Dakota, USA. For this purpose, Landsat 8 OLI images from the months of April through September for the years 2016–2021, with cloud cover of less than 10%, were acquired. After that, radiometric calibration and atmospheric correction were performed on all of the images. Some spectral indices were calculated using the Band Math toolbox in ENVI 5.3 (Environment for Visualizing Images v. 5.3). In the present study, the extracted spectral indices from Landsat 8 OLI images were the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Normalized Multiband Drought Index (NMDI). The results showed that the NDVI values for the month of July in different years were at maximum value at mostly pixels. Based on the statistical criteria, the best regression models for explaining the relationship between NDVI and NMDI(Soil) were polynomial order 2 for 2016 to 2019 and linear for 2021. The developed regression models accounted for 96.7, 95.7, 96.2, 88.4, and 32.2% of vegetation changes for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2021, respectively. However, there was no defined trend between NDVI and NMDI(Soil) observed in 2020. In addition, pixel-by-pixel analyses showed that drought significantly impacted vegetation coverage, and 69.6% of the pixels were negatively correlated with the NDVI. It was concluded that the Landsat satellite images have potential information for studying the relationships between vegetation growth status and drought, which is the primary step in site-specific management.