High spatial resolution Fractional Vegetation Cover maps OAL-DE (Elbe river). Further details can be found in D4.5 of the OPERANDUM project.

In order to reduce the risk posed by flooding, areas of woody vegetation have been removed along the riverbank of Elbe river in order to expedite the inflow and outflow of water from the main channel, and thus contribute to flattening the peak hydrographic response. Maintaining the effectiveness of this clearing requires that there is little or no regrowth of this woody vegetation. The NBS that have been implemented in OAL-Germany sees the use of various animals to graze these areas. NBS is devoted to prevent the re-growth of woody vegetation after an intervention which took place over a period from autumn 2014 to February 2015, when woody vegetation along the riverbank was cut back. Monitoring the effectiveness of the NBS is being performed by means of high spatial resolution remotely sensed data , i.e. Rapideye at 5 m spatial resolution. The preliminary analysis of this experiment consisted in the monitoring of the fractional vegetation cover over four of the seven NBS sites. The green fractional abundance (fc) was calculated by an algorithm based on scaling NDVI in-between the maximum and minimum NDVI values. A semi-empirical method based on the use of NDVI was used following Zeng et al, (2000), to calculate fc. The dataset contains layer stack of fractional abundance calculated for the images calculated by Rapideye images acquired on 18 April 2013, 15 April 2015, 17 March 2016, 9 April 2019.