Time series 30m resolution leaf area index estimation and vegetation change monitoring in Saihanba, China

Leaf area index (LAI) is one of the most important biophysical variables for regulating the physiological processes of vegetation canopy. Time series high-resolution LAI data is critical for vegetation growth monitoring, surface process simulation and global change research. However, there are no high-resolution LAI data products that are continuous in time and space. In this paper, we use MODIS LAI products and Landsat surface reflectance data to generate time series high-resolution LAI datasets from 2000 to 2018 in Saihanba based on the ensemble kalman filter, and uses time-series LAI data to monitor surface vegetation changes according to the Prophet model. Firstly, the multi-step Savitzky–Golay filtering algorithm is used to smooth the MODIS LAI data, and the upper envelope of time series LAI is generated. A dynamic model is constructed according to the trend of LAI upper envelope to provide the short-range forecast of LAI. Then the ground measured LAI data and the corresponding Landsat reflectance data are used to train a Back Propagation neural network. High-resolution LAI data from BP model is used to update the dynamic model in real time to generate high-resolution time series LAI data based on EnKF. Finally, the time series LAI data is used as the input of Prophet deep learning model to obtain the LAI time series prediction values of a certain year. Comparing the prediction results with the LAI of current year, the correlation coefficient and the root mean square error distribution maps can be obtained, a support vector machine method is used to classify the disturbed pixels and the normal pixels. The LAI time series estimation has a high accuracy of R²larger than 0.90, and RMSE less than 0.54. The disturbance monitoring results indicate that vegetation in 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017 is seriously disturbed, Variation of meteorological conditions and deforest contributes heavily to the disturbance.