MODIS Vegetation Fractional Cover with 500-Meter Resolution

A source of vegetation fractional cover, representing the exposed proportion of Photosynthetic Vegetation (PV), Non-Photosynthetic Vegetation (NPV), and Bare Soil (BS) per pixel derived from MODIS Nadir BRDF-Adjusted Reflectance. It includes monthly composites, total vegetation cover, and anomaly products, validated for Australia. The spatial resolution is 500 meters.

Use Cases

• Analyze monthly medoid composites of PV, NPV, and BS fractions to monitor seasonal vegetation dynamics.
• Calculate total vegetation cover anomalies by comparing a given month's PV+NPV value against the long-term mean for that month.
• Rank monthly total vegetation cover into deciles to identify extreme years within the time series.
• Map the spatial distribution of bare soil exposure using the BS fraction layer for land degradation assessment.

Strengths

• Derived from the MODIS MCD43A4 Collection 6 product, providing a consistent data source.
• Offers a suite of derivative products including monthly composites, anomalies, and decile rankings.
• Has been specifically validated for the Australian region.
• Provides data at a 500-meter spatial resolution.

Limitations

• In forested canopies, tree layers may obscure the fractional cover of underlying grass or soil, limiting accuracy in those areas.
• The dataset description does not specify the temporal range or the frequency of updates for the time series.
• Available file formats (HTML, PNG, TXT, WMS) are primarily for visualization and access, not analysis-ready tabular data.

Provenance

Source

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network's Data Discovery

Collection Method

Derived from the MODIS Nadir BRDF-Adjusted Reflectance product (MCD43A4) collection 6 using the CSIRO algorithm.

Time Range

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Freshness

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Geography

Validated for Australia; global coverage of MODIS source data implied but not explicitly stated.