Estimating fraction of photosynthetically active radiation of corn with vegetation indices and neural network from hyperspectral data

The fraction of photosynthetically active radiation (FPAR) is a key variable in the assessment of vegetation productivity and land ecosystem carbon cycles. Based on ground-measured corn hyperspectral reflectance and FPAR data over Northeast China, the correlations between corn-canopy FPAR and hyperspectral reflectance were analyzed, and the FPAR estimation performances using vegetation index (VI) and neural network (NN) methods with different two-band-combination hyperspectral reflectance were investigated. The results indicated that the corn-canopy FPAR retained almost a constant value in an entire day. The negative correlations between FPAR and visible and shortwave infrared reflectance (SWIR) bands are stronger than the positive correlations between FPAR and near-infrared band reflectance (NIR). For the six VIs, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and simple ratio (SR) performed best for estimating corn FPAR (the maximum R (2) of 0.8849 and 0.8852, respectively). However, the NN method estimated results (the maximum R (2) is 0.9417) were obviously better than all of the VIs. For NN method, the two-band combinations showing the best corn FPAR estimation performances were from the NIR and visible bands; for VIs, however, they were from the SWIR and NIR bands. As for both the methods, the SWIR band performed exceptionally well for corn FPAR estimation. This may be attributable to the fact that the reflectance of the SWIR band were strongly controlled by leaf water content, which is a key component of corn photosynthesis and greatly affects the absorption of photosynthetically active radiation (APAR), and makes further impact on corn-canopy FPAR.