For humid tropical forests alone, 4.5 million hectares per year were deforested during the same time period according to remote sensing estimates [4].
Daily meteorological data and remote sensing estimates of live and dead crop cover were used to simulate transpiration demand and soil evaporation.
Under this landscape conditions small plots can account for local expressions of environmental processes, decreasing the errors and uncertainties in remote sensing estimates caused by landscape heterogeneity.
At the same time, remote sensing estimates of foliar N or lignin N provide a high resolution landscape- and regional-scale index of N cycle hotspots (Martin et al. 2008; Ollinger et al. 2008; Ollinger et al. 2002).
While the LAI of individual species can be measured by destructive harvesting and LAI of whole landscapes can be estimated by remote sensing, estimates of species-specific LAI at the landscape-scale are lacking.
Recent work has demonstrated that thermal remote sensing estimates of surface radiometric temperature provide a complementary source of land surface information that can be used to define a robust proxy for root-zone (top 1 m of the soil column) soil moisture availability.
When the upscaling methods were applied to convert the instantaneous MODIS remote sensing estimates of ET to daily values, the accuracy of the extrapolated daily ET was controlled by the accuracy of both the remote sensing ET estimates and the upscaling methods themselves.
In contrast, remote sensing estimates of the timing of growing season termination were either weakly or not significantly associated with site measurements and model simulation results, due to the relative importance of light availability and other environmental controls on stand phenology in the fall.
