THE NDVI VALUES DIFFERENCES IN RELATION TO CANOPY DENSITY USING SENTINEL-2 LEVEL-2A REMOTE SENSING DATA

This paper presents the results of a research on the relationship between the NDVI and stand canopy density.The study was conducted within the Forest Management Unit ''Bruske ume'', located in Central Serbia.The aim of this study is to determine whether there is a significant difference between the NDVI values depending on stand canopy density in high forests, coppice forests and artificially established stands.The stand canopy density data were collected from the Forest Management Plan and validated in the field, while the NDVI data were obtained using the Google Earth Engine platform based on Sentinel-2 Level 2A imagery.A one-way ANOVA was performed to assess the statistical significance of differences in the NDVI values between stand canopy density classes, followed by an LSD test for post-hoc group comparisons.The results of the research indicate that the arithmetic means of the NDVI values by stand canopy density across the three forest origin categories reveal a clear and consistent trend of decrease of the NDVI values with decreasing stand canopy density.The ANOVA revealed that the NDVI values differed significantly between stands with different levels of canopy density within each of the three forest origin groups.In all analyzed categories, stands with a dense canopy had the highest NDVI values.The highest NDVI values were recorded in high forest stands, while the lowest values were observed in artificially established stands.