Many consequences of land use and land cover changes (LULCC) can be captured by remote sensing imagery, and here in particular by estimates of photosynthetic activity. For example, the harvesting of trees or reed will cause an abrupt drop in vegetation cover, while planting crops and fertilization and watering will result in gradual increase in vegetation cover over time. Vegetation can be captured by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), a widely used remote sensing metric that quantifies the health and density of vegetation.

Provided here are two intermediate analysis results showing abrupt and gradual vegetation change in the study region of Neusiedl in the INSPIRE project (https://www.inspire-biodiversa.com/). Vegetation cover was estimated as monthly NDVI Sentinel 2 Level-2A data. Input satellite imagery were pre-processed by removing clouds and gaps and constructing atmospherically corrected surface reflectance estimates at monthly time steps (arithmetric average aggregation).