README.md

In mosscoder/crustCover: Tools for quanitfying biocrust cover

crustCover

This package was developed as a tool to quantify biocrust activity, development, and cover from ground-based photo data. We implement the methods of Fischer et al. (2012) in which reflectance values of the visible red (VIS) and near-infrared bands (NIR) are estimated from decomposed color channels of a visible light camera. The method entails taking two images, one unfiltered and one with an infrared filter installed over the camera lens, of a scene containing biocrust and a color checker chart of known reflectance values. With these photo data they modeled reflectance as a function of camera pixel brightness, using the color checker cells as training data. From these modeled reflectance values they calculated NDVI of biocrust. While Fischer et al. employed reflectance values in visible red (600-700nm) and near-infrared (800-900nm) bands, earlier works report color checker reflectance values of blue (400-500nm) and green (500-600nm) bands (Ritchie et al. 2008). We extend this approach, modeling the visible red, blue, green, and NIR reflectances as a function of pixel values, to calculate a suite of seven vegetation and biocrust indices. https://storage.googleapis.com/crustcover/vignette.html

mosscoder/crustCover documentation built on May 23, 2019, 6:12 a.m.