Comparative Analysis of the Growing Season of Typical Forest Using Two Vegetation Indices

To study the growth variation of the large regional forest vegetation, this paper selected two vegetation indices data-EVI and NDVI to monitor the changes of growth period from 2000 to 2011 in six typical forests in China, then compared the results by using the statistical analysis. The results show that from the growing trend and the time when growing season appeared, the time range of growth changes extracted from two kinds of vegetation indices are basically the same in the six typical forest types and could perfectly reflect the process of change of forest growing season. This indicates that the method of using vegetation index to monitor forest growing season is feasible. EVI is more effective to the changes of forest vegetation for high forest coverage area and less sensitive to disturbances such as cloud. In conclusion, EVI is more suitable for monitoring the changes in the forest which has various types′ forest vegetation in large area space than NDVI.