Estimation of Mixed Forests Clumping Index and Its Spatial Heterogeneity Study.

Foliage Clumping Index (CI) is an important structural parameter within vegetation canopy, and current satellite-borne CI products mainly retrieved by using the linear relationship between the CI and the normalized difference between hotspot and dark spot (NDHD), while there is no directly model to calculate the CI of mixed forest. The objective of this paper is to propose a new method to calculate the mixed forest CI (MFCI) and access the ability to response the spatial heterogeneity of mixed forest pixels. The results show that: (1) The accuracy of MFCI is significantly higher than that of existing MODIS CI products, the average error can be reduced by 6.3% (2) the total sensitivity of MFCI to spatial heterogeneity is high(>0.6), and with the highest sensitivity to bare soil.