Quantitative characterization of the vegetation red edge reflectance 1. An inverted-Gaussian reflectance model

Abstract An inverted-Gaussian model for the vegetation red edge reflectance is evaluated with respect to its applicability as a simple four-parameter descriptor of vegetation reflectance in the 670 to 800 nm spectral region under a wide range of environmental/measurement conditions. The model has been fitted to laboratory spectral reflectance measurements of single leaves, leaf stacks and needle clump stacks for a number of species. For all of these data the model has been found to provide an effective quantitative representation of the shape and position of the vegetation red edge reflectance in terms of four parameters of physical significance: 1R shoulder reflectance R s, chlorophyll-well minimum reflectance R 0, red edge inflection point wavelength λp and reflectance minimum wavelength λ0. Provided that an appropriate strategy has been adopted to select the initial guess model parameters and the spectral range of reflectance data to be fitted, the values of derived model parameters can be used for a q...