What Is The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)?

The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) is widely used for monitoring, analyzing, and mapping temporal and spatial distributions of physiological and biophysical characteristics of vegetation (Gitelson, 2004). NDVI which is based on different radiation absorption by green biomass in Red and NIR wavebands is widely used for the assessment of the green plant biomass at ground, airborne and satellite levels (Marino et al., 2014). Forests in urban stands tend to have lower stem densities, unless those stands are native remnants in large parks or former estates (Pickett, 2011). Climate has an inevitable impact on the growing environment and on the condition of vegetation at a location (Kolawole et al., 2014). The normalized difference
An increase of NDVI with increasing vegetation usually corresponds with differences in vegetation community composition: perennial vegetation, ephemeral vegetation and mixed spring vegetation (White, 2016). However, soil erosion, desertification, loss of biodiversity are natural processes that can lead to land degradation. According to (VanWesten, 2013) these processes and related events are likely to accelerate/aggravate other natural hazards such as dust storms and hurricanes at different scales yet most countries still pay little attention to land maintenance when carrying out physical developments. Soil moisture is the main source of natural water for natural vegetation and cultivated crop plants hence it influences a variety of processes related to plant growth and agricultural production. Land degradation therefore will harm many factors including soil moisture which has so much influence on vegetative cover in an area (Dobriyal, 2012). The NDVI responds to actively photosynthesizing material increasing as the quantity of green biomass increases (Burgan and Hartford, 1993). This characteristic of