Spaceborne Spectral Characterization Of Non-Photosynthetic Vegetation Cover

This study evaluated the non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) cover estimation performance of Landsat Next bands simulated with PRISMA imagery. Three shortwave infrared (SWIR) bands currently specified for Landsat Next and three additional SWIR bands were computed and compared to ground observations of NPV cover (n = 178) using linear regression. The newly developed Dual Absorption NPV Index (DANI) and Continuum Interpolated NPV Depth Index (CINDI) achieved the highest performance in NPV cover estimation for their respective band combinations with RMSEs of 8.587% and 10.715%, respectively. Bands simulated from PRISMA data achieved slightly higher accuracies for NPV cover estimation compared to WorldView-3 imagery despite having a coarser spatial resolution (30-m vs. 4-m).