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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

Land management

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Linking Phenology And Biomass Productivity In South Dakota Mixed-Grass Prairie, Matthew Rigge, Alexander Smart, Bruce Wylie, Tagir Gilmanov, Patricia Johnson Sep 2013

Linking Phenology And Biomass Productivity In South Dakota Mixed-Grass Prairie, Matthew Rigge, Alexander Smart, Bruce Wylie, Tagir Gilmanov, Patricia Johnson

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

Assessing the health of rangeland ecosystems based solely on annual biomass production does not fully describe the condition of the plant community; the phenology of production can provide inferences about species composition, successional stage, and grazing impacts. We evaluated the productivity and phenology of western South Dakota mixed-grass prairie in the period from 2000 to 2008 using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The NDVI is based on 250-m spatial resolution Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite imagery. Growing-season NDVI images were integrated weekly to produce time-integrated NDVI (TIN), a proxy of total annual biomass production, and integrated seasonally to …