Canopy near-infrared reflectance and terrestrial photosynthesis

Quantifying the near-infrared light reflected by plant canopies improves our ability to estimate global photosynthesis. Global estimates of terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) remain highly uncertain, despite decades of satellite measurements and intensive in situ monitoring. We report a new approach for quantifying the near-infrared reflectance of terrestrial vegetation (NIRV). NIRV provides a foundation for a new approach to estimate GPP that consistently untangles the confounding effects of background brightness, leaf area, and the distribution of photosynthetic capacity with depth in canopies using existing moderate spatial and spectral resolution satellite sensors. NIRV is strongly correlated with solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, a direct index of photons intercepted by chlorophyll, and with site-level and globally gridded estimates of GPP. NIRV makes it possible to use existing and future reflectance data as a starting point for accurately estimating GPP.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2017-03-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.1602244PMID 28345046PMCID 5362170
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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