Moisture Content Vegetation Seasonal Variability Based on a Multiscale Remote Sensing Approach

Water content is one of the most critical characteristics in plant physiological development. Therefore, this information is a crucial factor in determining the water stress conditions of vegetation, which is essential for assessing the wildfire risk and land management decision-making. Remote sensing can be vital for obtaining information over large, limited access areas with global coverage. This is important since conventional techniques for collecting vegetation water content are expensive, time-consuming, and spatially limited. This work aims to evaluate the vegetation live fuel moisture content (LFMC) seasonal variability using a multiscale remote sensing approach, particularly on rockroses, the Cistus ladanifer species, a Western Mediterranean basin native species with wide spatial distribution, over the Herdade da Mitra at the University of Évora, Portugal. This work used four dataset sources, collected monthly between June 2022 and July 2023: (i) Vegetation samples used to calculate the LFMC; (ii) Vegetation reflectance spectral signature using the portable spectroradiometer FieldSpec HandHeld-2 (HH2); (iii) Multispectral optical imagery obtained from the Multispectral Instrument (MSI) sensor onboard the Sentinel-2 satellite; and (iv) Multispectral optical imagery derived from a camera onboard an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Phantom 4 Multispectral (P4M). Several temporal analyses were performed based on datasets from different sensors and on their intercomparison. Furthermore, the Random Forest (RF) classifier, a machine learning model, was used to estimate the LFMC considering each sensor approach. MSI sensor presented the best results (R2 = 0.94) due to the presence of bands on the Short-Wave Infrared Imagery region. However, despite having information only in the Visible and Near Infrared spectral regions, the HH2 presents promising results (R2 = 0.86). This suggests that by combining these spectral regions with a RF classifier, it is possible to effectively estimate the LFMC. This work shows how different spatial scales, from remote sensing observations, affect the LFMC estimation through machine learning techniques.