Periodic vegetation pattern classification in Sudan

This archive contains features computed from satellites images in Kordofan State in Sudan. SPOT (Systeme Probatoire d’Observation de la Terre) images with a 10-m ground resolution and preprocessing level 2A were divided into non-overlapping square windows of 410 by 410 m. We calculated for each of these windows:

• skewness of the grayscale distribution of each window
• index of vegetation pattern anisotropy
• azimuthal angle in the first PCA plane, which directly correlates with the dominant frequency in the windows
• distance from PCA origin, which expresses the degree of scale dominance
• mean annual rainfall computed from gridded monthly estimates from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM, NASA/JAXA) 3B43 V6 product acquired from 1 January 1998 to 31 December 2007 and resampled to 410 by 410 m.
• slope computed from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) digital elevation model with three arc seconds
  horizontal (ca 92 m in this area) spatial resolution.

The resulting pattern classification:

• 1, spots
• 2, labyrinthine
• 3, gaps
• 4, bands
• 5, non-periodic
• Nodata, area not covered by SPOT images

Data is provided as rasters in Arc/Info ASCII grid format (also known as Esri grid). The projection and datum for all datasets are UTM zone 35 N, WGS 1984.

Details on the methods are availble in the following publication: Deblauwe, V., Couteron, P., Lejeune, O., Bogaert, J. & Barbier, N. (2011) Environmental modulation of self-organized periodic vegetation patterns in Sudan. Ecography, 34, 990-1001. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0587.2010.06694.x