Remote sensing of leaf area index of vegetation covers

Since leaf surface is a substrate on which major physical and biological processes of plants occur, leaf area index (LAI) is arguably the most important vegetation structural parameter and indispensible for all process-based models for estimating terrestrial fluxes of energy, water, carbon, and other masses. It is therefore of interest not only to the remote sensing community that produces LAI maps but also to ecological, meteorological, and hydrological communities that use LAI products for various modeling purposes (Sellers et al. 1997; Dai et al. 2003; Chen et al. 2005).