Biomass Modeling of Four Leading World Crops Using Hyperspectral Narrowbands in Support of HyspIRI Mission

New satellite missions are expected to record high spectral resolution information globally and consistently for the first time, so it is important to identify modeling techniques that take advantage of these new data. In this paper, we estimate biomass for four major crops using ground-based hyperspectral narrowbands. The spectra and their derivatives are evaluated using three modeling techniques: two-band hyperspectral vegetation indices (HVIs), multiple band-HVIs (MB-HVIs) developed from Sequential Search Methods (SSM), and MB-HVIs developed from Principal Component Regression. Overall, the two-band Hvis and MB-HVIs developed from SSMs using first derivative transformed spectra in the visible blue and green and NIR explained more biomass variability and had lower error than the other approaches or transformations; however a better search criterion needs to be developed in order to reflect the true ability of the two-band Ho approach. Short-Wave Infrared 1 (1000 to 1700 nm) proved less effective, but still important in the final models.