In this study, the Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index (SPEI) was applied to characterize the drought conditions in Southwest China from 1982–2012. The SPEI was calculated by precipitation and temperature data for various accumulation periods. Based on the SPEI, the multi-scale patterns, the trend, and the spatio-temporal extent of drought were evaluated, respectively. The results explicitly showed a drying trend of Southwest China. The mean SPEI values at five time scales all decreased significantly. Some moderate and severe droughts were captured after 2005 and the droughts were even getting aggravated. By examining the spatio-temporal extent, the aggravating condition of drought was further revealed. To investigate the performance of SPEI, correlation analysis was conducted between SPEI and two remotely sensed drought indices: Soil Moisture Condition Index (SMCI) and Vegetation Condition Index (VCI). The comparison was also conducted with the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). The results showed that for both SMCI and VCI, the SPI and SPEI had approximate correlations with them. The SPEI could better monitor the soil moisture than the SPI in months with significant increase of temperature. The correlations between the VCI and SPI/SPEI were lower; nevertheless, the SPEI was slightly superior to the SPI.

Globe-LFMC is an extensive global database of live fuel moisture content (LFMC) measured from 1,383 sampling sites in 11 countries: Argentina, Australia, China, France, Italy, Senegal, Spain, South Africa, Tunisia, United Kingdom and the United States of America. The database contains 161,717 individual records based on in situ destructive samples used to measure LFMC, representing the amount of water in plant leaves per unit of dry matter. The primary goal of the database is to calibrate and validate remote sensing algorithms used to predict LFMC. However, this database is also relevant for the calibration and validation of dynamic global vegetation models, eco-physiological models of plant water stress as well as understanding the physiological drivers of spatiotemporal variation in LFMC at local, regional and global scales. Globe-LFMC should be useful for studying LFMC trends in response to environmental change and LFMC influence on wildfire occurrence, wildfire behavior, and overall vegetation health.

Retrieval of vegetation parameters from remotely sensed data using a radiative transfer model is generally hampered by the ill-posed inverse problem, which dramatically decreases the precision level of retrieved parameters. The purpose of this study was to use a Bayesian network-based method to allow the alleviation of the ill-posed inverse problem. This was achieved by introducing the correlations between the model free parameters into their prior joint probability distribution (PJPD), allowing the reduction of the probabilities of unrealistic combinations. Three sampling strategies intended to design three types of PJPDs that considered different correlations (represented by a correlation matrix) were presented. They were multivariate uniform distribution composed by independent free parameters, multivariate uniform distribution based on a simple correlation matrix, and multivariate Gaussian distribution based on a complicated correlation matrix, respectively. A case study of the presented method to retrieve leaf area index (LAI) and canopy water content (CWC) using the PROSAIL_5B (PROSPECT-5 + 4SAIL) model from Landsat 8 products was implemented. Results indicate that the presented method greatly improves the precision level of target parameters, with the coefficient of determination R ² of 0.69, 0.77, and 0.82 and root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 0.55, 0.51, and 0.44 m ² · m ^-2 for LAI and R ² = 0.68, 0.78, and 0.84 and RMSE = 230, 198, and 166 g · m ^-2 for CWC, respectively. Hence, the ill-posed inverse problem can be alleviated by the presented method, which can be widely applied for vegetation parameters retrieval.