Isla Clarion – Remotely Sensed NDVI – Normalized Difference Vegetation Index

For the last several years, my personal research interests have been in the area of conservation planning for remote places.  This year I picked Isla Clarion, one of the Revillagigedo Islands, and a recent UNESCO Natural Heritage Site (2016) and national park of Mexico (2017), as my target area. Much of the effort of the research is identifying data sources that are freely available to the public and developing protocols so that the data can be brought into citizen science projects relating to conservation.  The image above was from a very recent Landsat 8 flyover of the island (at the time of posting), downloaded from the USGS Earth Explorer site and then processed using the European Space Agency’s SNAP visualization tool.  The observed spectral amplitude of the red and Near Infrared (NIR) reflected light energy from bands 4 and 8 on the satellite are entered into a calculation to create and index of current plant growth.  The Index is called an NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and run from around zero up to 1.0 with areas of 0.3 being areas of near desert growth while those in a lush wet tropical forest are likely to close to 0.9. I presented the work at the 2019 Society for Conservation GIS at Asilomar State Park in Pacific Grove, CA this July.  I am hoping to have the video of talk posted shortly.