Relationship between herbaceous biomass and 1‐km2 Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) NDVI in Kruger National Park, South Africa

The relationship between multi‐year (1989–2003), herbaceous biomass and 1‐km2 Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data in Kruger National Park (KNP), South Africa is considered. The objectives were: (1) to analyse the underlying relationship between NDVI summed for the growth season (ΣNDVI) and herbaceous biomass in field sites (n = 533) through time and (2) to investigate the possibility of producing reliable herbaceous biomass maps for each growth season from the satellite ΣNDVI observations. Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and Thematic Mapper (TM) data were used to identify highly heterogeneous field sites and exclude them from the analyses. The average R 2 for the ΣNDVI–biomass relationship at individual sites was 0.42. The growth season mean biomass and ΣNDVI of most landscape groups were strongly correlated with rainfall and each other. Although measured tree cover and MODIS estimates of tree cover did not have a detectable effect on the ΣNDVI–biomass relationship, other observations suggest that tree cover should not be ignored. The ΣNDVI was successful at estimating inter‐annual variations in the biomass at single sites, but on an annual basis the relationship derived from all the sites was not strong enough (average R 2 = 0.36) to produce reliable growth season biomass maps. This was mainly attributed to the fact that the biomass data were sampled from very small field sites that were not fully representative of 1‐km2 AVHRR pixels. Supplementary field surveys that sample a larger area for each field site (e.g. 1 km2 or larger) should account for the variability in biomass and may improve the strength of ΣNDVI–biomass relationships observed in a single growth season.