ABSTRACT
Components of the landscape that are observed for Earth science studies often need to be discriminated, identified, and quantified for a variety of environmental research assessments. We discuss the importance of hyperspectral remote sensing methods for determining landscape components of arid ecosystems that include dead and standing plant litter and dryland invasive plant species such as tamarisk and buffelgrass. We provide two case studies on these species, covering their study description, spectral reflectance data collection, and image analyses, and comment on the separability of the signatures from mixed scenes as well as scaling to Landsat data. The diagnostic feature, the cellulose absorption index, has been useful in case studies for those specific invasive species but also may prove useful for the detection of many other target species such as invasive grasses, shrubs, and trees in arid or semiarid regions.
