Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (CBESS) Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) in saltmarsh and mudflat habitats

The location of the sample sites was determined by randomly allocated quadrats. Twenty-two 1 x 1 m quadrats were randomly allocated to each mudflat and saltmarsh site using R (R Development Core Team, 2014) to specify four different spatial scales (A = 1 quadrat only, B = 3 quadrats at 1 m to 10 m apart, C = 6 quadrats at 10 m to 100 m apart, D = 12 quadrats at 100 m to 1000 m or site maximum). These quadrats are common to all CBESS quadrat data. NDVI measurements were obtained before any destructive harvesting of the quadrats.

An OceanOptics USB2000 spectrometer with a 1.5 m fibre optic was used in all measurements. OOIBase32 Version 2.0.1.3 was used to log data on a laptop. Reflectance measurements were taken at 1.5 m above the ground surface. At each quadrat: 1) the integration time of the spectrometer was adjusted such that the peak of the white reference spectra was approx 75% of the spectrometers maximum level; 2) for short integration times (<100 ms) spectral averaging was used to reduce measurement noise; 3) a dark measurement was recorded; 4) a white reference measurement was recorded; and 5) the reflectance measurement was made. A note is made of the number of the OOBase files associated with the quadrat number and percentage cloud and water cover of the quadrat and any other relevant information are taken. NDVI is calculated in Matlab.

This dataset is included in the following collections

Biological, ecological and physical data collected from salt marsh and mudflat sites on the West and East coast of England during the winter and summer of 2013 by the Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability (CBESS) project