Investigating spatial relationship between vegetation cover and soil moisture using sentinel satellites: a case study of North Gondar Zone, Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

Assessing spatial and temporal variations of soil moisture has a great role in different applications, such as natural resource management, flood-risk prediction, irrigation development, hydrology, and climatology. The current study is focusing on investigating the spatial relationship between soil moisture and vegetation cover. The Delta index model was applied using Sentinel-1 images to estimate soil moisture, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index was applied using Sentinel-2 images to assess vegetation cover. Besides, regression analysis was conducted to investigate the spatial relationship between soil moisture and vegetation cover. The derived soil moisture ranges from 0% to 48.4811%. Most areas with high elevation had high soil moisture, and low elevation had low soil moisture. In most part of the study area, vegetation cover and soil moisture have a direct relationship. Thus, higher vegetation cover was observed in areas with higher soil moisture; and lower vegetation cover was observed in areas with lower soil moisture.

KEYWORDS:

• Soil moisture
• vegetation cover
• regression analysis
• sentinel
• North Gondar

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the European Space Agency (ESA) for providing access to Sentinel images free of charge in their data hub.

Authors contribution

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Worku Nega (Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization and Writing original draft); Wondifraw Nigussie (Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Visualization, Review & editing the original draft) and Abel Balew (Conceptualization, Investigation, Visualization, Review & editing the original draft).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).