Keynote Speaker: Yasushi Yamaguchi
Title: Remote sensing for vegetation monitoring, disaster damage assessment, and mineralogical mapping.
Yasushi Yamaguchi is the Director in General at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies Education and research center for sustainable co-development at Nagoya University, Japan. He is a full professor at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies where he served as the Dean from 2009 to 2011. He also served as the President of the Remote Sensing Society of Japan from 2012 to 2014. He is the Science Team Leader for ASTER, where his research is focused on remote sensing using data from ASTER and other optical sensor images for geological mapping, terrestrial vegetation monitoring, and heat balance analysis in urban centers. In addition, he uses data from a lunar radar sounder on-board the Kaguya lunar probe, to analyze the subsurface structure of the moon.
ABSTRACT
Remote sensing is a powerful tool to monitor drought periodically over a wide area by using a sensor onboard a satellite or aircraft. Several indices have been developed to identify and monitor vegetation by combining spectral features derived from multispectral remote sensing data. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) has been widely used to assess vegetation based upon characteristic spectral features of chlorophyll in the visible to near-infrared regions. Normalize Difference Water Index (NDWI) allows us to estimate relative water contents of vegetation by combining data from near-infrared and short-wave-infrared bands. Maki et al. (2004) proposed Vegetation Dryness Index (VDI) to assess water stress of vegetation by combining NDVI and NDWI. Vegetation Water Temperature Condition Index (VWTCI) was developed by Shakya and Yamaguchi (2010) in order to assess both water and temperature stresses of vegetation and was applied to monitor drought in Nepal and central northeastern India. Drought Severity Index (DSI) by Mu et al. (2013) is a dimensionless index calculated as a standardized anomaly of the long-term NDVI and ET/PET (a ratio of evapotranspiration and potential evapotranspiration). We tested VDI, VWTCI and DVI in some test areas. Among these indices, DSI gave us a promising result in monitoring a severe drought occurred from 2009 to 2010 in southwestern China and is a good candidate for drought monitoring in the south Asian countries.
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