Assessing a river floodplain status using airborne imaging spectrometer data and ground validation – The HyEco'04 project

River floodplains are very dynamic systems and in Western-Europe they are often used to combine different functions: flood protection, nature, recreation, agriculture and extraction of sand, clay and gravel. For optimal management of these river systems monitoring of vegetation succession and hydrodynamic and hydromorphological processes is essential. In addition, dynamic models are adopted to assist management decisions by comparing different future river management scenarios. These models have a strong need for spatially continuous data that are often unavailable at present. Several recent studies have shown that imaging spectroscopy can be applied for quantitative retrieval of biochemical and biophysical variables (e.g., LAI, biomass, canopy nitrogen, vegetation structure) that are required for model initialization and calibration and for monitoring the floodplain status in general.