The effect of land-cover change on vegetation greenness-based satellite agricultural drought indicators: a case study in the southwest climate division of Indiana, USA

During the last decade, the use of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for drought monitoring applications has drawn many criticisms, mainly because a number of drivers such as land-cover/land-use change, pest infestation, and flooding may depress the NDVI, further causing false drought identification. In this study, the impacts of land-cover change on the NDVI-derived satellite drought indicator, the vegetation condition index (VCI), are presented. It was found that the VCI is sensitive to changes in land cover, especially deforestation, the land cover changes from evergreen and deciduous forests to other land-cover classes. However, because the scale of land-cover changes was very small across the study area, only trivial drought alerts were observed in the VCI-based drought maps during non-drought years. Because drought is a large-scale climate event, it is reasonable to neglect these alerts. Besides, when the VCI was averaged to climate division scale, the results obtained through the VCI method were in good agreement with those acquired by the meteorological data-based drought indices such as the Palmer drought severity index and standardized precipitation index.