remote sensing Article Analysis of Sentinel-2 and RapidEye for Retrieval of Leaf Area Index in a Saltmarsh Using a Radiative Transfer Model Roshanak Darvishzadeh 1,* , Tiejun Wang 1 , Andrew Skidmore 1,2 , Anton Vrieling 1 , Brian O’Connor 3, Tawanda W Gara 1,4 , Bruno J. Ens 5 and Marc Paganini 6 1 Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands;
[email protected] (T.W.);
[email protected] (A.S.);
[email protected] (A.V.);
[email protected] (T.W.G.) 2 Department of Environmental Science, Macquarie University, Sydney 2106, Australia 3 UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, 219 Huntingdon Road, Cambridge CB3 0DL, UK; Brian.O’
[email protected] 4 Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Zimbabwe, Mount Pleasant, Harare P.O. Box MP167, Zimbabwe 5 Sovon Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology, Sovon-Texel, Den Burg 1790 AB, The Netherlands;
[email protected] 6 European Space Agency-ESRIN, Via Galileo Galilei, Casella Postale 64, Frascati 00044, Italy;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +31-53-4874240 Received: 14 February 2019; Accepted: 13 March 2019; Published: 20 March 2019 Abstract: The Sentinel satellite fleet of the Copernicus Programme offers new potential to map and monitor plant traits at fine spatial and temporal resolutions. Among these traits, leaf area index (LAI) is a crucial indicator of vegetation growth and an essential variable in biodiversity studies. Numerous studies have shown that the radiative transfer approach has been a successful method to retrieve LAI from remote-sensing data.