RSPD: A Novel Remote Sensing Index of Plant Biodiversity Combining Spectral Variation Hypothesis and Productivity Hypothesis

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Plant diversity (PD) plays an important role in maintaining the healthy function of an ecosystem through affecting the productivity, stability, and nutrient utilization of a terrestrial ecosystem. Remote sensing is a vital way to monitor the status and changes of PD. Most of the existing methods rely on a field botany survey to construct a statistical relationship between PD and remote sensing observations. However, a field botany survey is too costly to be applied widely. In this study, we constructed a new remote sensing index of PD (RSPD), combining the spectral variation hypothesis and productivity hypothesis. Concretely, the RSPD integrated the multi-band spectral reflectance and several spectral greenness, moisture, and red-edge vegetation indices with the principles of Shannon information entropy and Euclidean distance. The RSPD was evaluated by comparing the classical coefficient of variation (CV) method and the Shannon and Simpson diversity indices based on vegetation classification results. Two cases were selected, where Case I was in Beijing and Case II was located in part of Huai’an, China. Sentinel-2 data in three years of 2016, 2018, and 2020 and higher-resolution Pléiades-1 data in 2018 were also utilized. The results demonstrate that: (1) the RSPD is basically consistent with the CV in spatiotemporal variation; (2) the RSPD outperforms the CV as compared with Shannon and Simpson diversity indices that are based on vegetation classification results with Sentinel-2 and Pléiades-1 data; (3) the RSPD outperforms the CV as compared with visual interpretations with Google Earth image. The suggested index can reflect the richness and evenness of plant species, which is inherent in its calculation formula. Moreover, it has a great potential for large-scale regional and long-term series monitoring.