## Monitor Vegetation

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This tool performs an arithmetic operation on the bands of a multiband raster layer to reveal vegetation coverage information of the study area.

## Select the input data

Choose the multiband raster layer. Make sure the input raster has the appropriate bands available.

## Choose method to monitor vegetation

Select the method used to create the vegetation index layer. The different vegetation indexes can help highlight certain features, or help reduce various noise.

- Global Environmental Monitoring Index — GEMI is a nonlinear vegetation index for global environmental monitoring from satellite imagery. It is similar to NDVI, but it is less sensitive to atmospheric effects. It is affected by bare soil; therefore, it is not recommended for use in areas of sparse or moderately dense vegetation.
- Green Vegetation Index - Landsat TM — GVI was originally designed from Landsat MSS imagery but has been modified for use with Landsat TM imagery. It is also known as the Landsat TM Tasseled Cap green vegetation index. This monitoring index can also be used with imagery whose bands share the same spectral characteristics.
- Modified Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index — MSAVI2 is a vegetation index that tries to minimize bare soil influences of the SAVI method.
- Normalized Difference Vegetation Index — NDVI is a standardized index allowing you to generate an image displaying greenness, relative biomass. This index takes advantage of the contrast of the characteristics of two bands from a multispectral raster dataset; the chlorophyll pigment absorptions in the red band and the high reflectivity of plant materials in the near-infrared (NIR) band.
- Perpendicular Vegetation Index — PVI is similar to a difference vegetation index; however, it is sensitive to atmospheric variations. When using this method to compare different images, it should only be used on images that have been atmospherically corrected. This information can be provided by your data vendor.
- Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index — SAVI is a vegetation index that attempts to minimize soil brightness influences using a soil-brightness correction factor. This is often used in arid regions where vegetative cover is low.
- Sultan's Formula — The Sultan's Formula process takes a six-band 8-bit image and applied a specific algorithm to it to produce a three-band 8-bit image. The resulting image highlights rock formations called ophiolites on coastlines. This formula was designed based on the TM and ETM bands of a Landsat 5 or 7 scene.
- Transformed Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index — Transformed-SAVI is a vegetation index that attempts to minimize soil brightness influences by assuming the soil line has an arbitrary slope and intercept.

## Specify indexes of NIR band and Red band

Type the band indexes for the near-infrared (NIR) and Red bands.

Each satellite sensor and aerial camera captures information that is broken up into band indexes. Each band index contains the information for a specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This vegetation monitoring method requires you to specify the band index that captured the NIR and Red wavelengths.

## Slope of soil line

The slope of the soil line. The slope is the approximate linear relationship between the NIR and red bands on a scatterplot.

This parameter is only valid for Transformed Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index.

## Intercept

This is the value of near infrared (NIR) when the reflection value of the red (Red) band is 0 for the particular soil lines.

`(a = NIR - sRed)` , when Red is 0.

This parameter is only valid for Transformed Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index.

## Amount of green vegetation cover

The SAVI method requires the amount of vegetation cover to be specified.

Type in a value between 0.0 and 1.0, where

- 1 = areas with no green vegetation cover
- 0.5 = areas with moderate green vegetation cover
- 0 = areas with high green vegetation cover

## Adjustment factor

The Transformed Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index method requires the adjustment factor set in order to help minimize soil effect. The default value is 0.08.

A lower value means that you are ignoring the soil effect. A high value means that the soil is will affect your result.

## Result layer name

The name of the layer that will be created in My Content and added to the map. The default name is based on the tool name and the input layer name. If the layer already exists, you will be asked to provide another name.

Using the Save result in drop-down box, you can specify the name of a folder in My Content where the result will be saved.