ABSTRACT
Water availability is essential for plant growth. It controls plant water status and determines a series of plant physiological processes as well. A clear understanding of both parameters is therefore important for elucidating the response of plants to different water conditions. Among all available physiological parameters indicating plant water status, the leaf scale water content is one of the fundamental parameters for assessing plants’ physiological status, especially on detecting plant drought stress. Alternatively, hyperspectral remote sensing, providing information of targets with high spectral and spatial resolutions, has shown to be an effective tool to identify ecosystem water use conditions. The field data of xeric ecosystems were taken in the Integrated Remote Sensing Experimental Site, located at the southern border of the Gurbantunggut Desert in China. Developed approaches of hyperspectral remote sensing for retrieving plant traits can typically be grouped into two categories, namely, physically based inversions and empirically/statistically based methods.
