Satellite Remote Sensing of Alpine Vegetation Dynamics: Challenges and Perspectives

Satellite greening has become a key tool for monitoring alpine vegetation change, but a positive vegetation-index trend is not an ecological observation in itself. This perspective shows that interpreting alpine greening requires addressing two sequential challenges: methodological complexity, which can bias trends during image processing, and phenomenological complexity, because different ecological processes can produce similar spectral signals. Progress now depends less on producing more greening maps than on linking robust satellite trends to ground-based ecological processes.