Soil reflectance modeling & hyperspectral mixture analysis: Towards vegetation spectra minimizing the soil background contamination

Soil moisture variations dominate the spectral reflectance of soils in the 350–2500 nm wavelength domain and affect the effectiveness of spectral indices used to monitor variations in soil and vegetation properties. Removing soil moisture effects in spectral images is critical for agricultural remote sensing. A soil moisture reflectance model is successfully applied in combination with a hyperspectral mixture analysis approach to reduce soil moisture effects in (simulated) remote sensing images of citrus orchards, improving as such the site-specific monitoring of crop status.