Exploring the Capabilities of Sentinel-2 Data in Vegetation Health/Stress Mapping

The freely available imagery from Sentinel-2, with 13 optical narrow bands in moderate-to-high spatial resolution (10, 20, and 60m) attracts the research community to explore the potentiality of bands for different land services. This study examined the capabilities of Sentinel-2 in vegetation health/stress monitoring, especially, narrow red-edge bands and their significance in deriving vegetation health/stress using different vegetation parameters such as leaf water contents, level of carotenoid pigment and chlorophyll. The study area is Keoladeo National Park (KNP), Bharatpur, Rajasthan, India. National park is selected to utilize the diversity of park to examine the suitability of bands for vegetation health/stress mapping. The availability of bands for the wavelength at 500μm, 445μm, 705μm, 750μm, 680μm, 819μm, and 1599μm have shown the importance for vegetation's health/stress mapping. Furthermore, the relative amounts of vegetation health scaled from 1 (unhealthy) to 9 (healthy) are also calculated. Comparative analysis with different indexes is also discussed in KNP. Results of this study show the significance of the Sentinel-2 red-edge bands in vegetation health/stress mapping.