Improved modeling of gross primary production from a better representation of photosynthetic components in vegetation canopy

Non-photosynthetic components within the canopy (e.g., dry leaves and stem) contribute little to photosynthesis and therefore, remote sensing of gross primary production (GPP) could be improved by the removal of these components. A scaled enhanced vegetation index (EVI), which is usually regarded as a linear function of EVI, was found to have the strongest relationship with chlorophyll level fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FPARchl) and can help improve GPP estimation in croplands compared to canopy level FPAR (FPARcanopy). However, the application of the FPARchl theory to other plant functional types (PFTs) and the underlying reasons remain largely unknown. In this study, based on standard MODIS algorithm we comprehensively assessed the performances of FPARcanopy, scaled EVI (FPARchl1), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), scaled NDVI (FPARchl2) and EVI as proxies of FPAR for estimating GPP at four forest and six non-forest sites (e.g., grasslands, croplands and wetlands) from ChinaFLUX, representing a wide range of ecosystems with different canopy structures and eco-climatic zones. Our results showed that the scaled EVI (FPARchl1) as FPAR effectively improved the accuracy of estimated GPP for the entire PFTs. FPARchl1 substantially improved forest GPP estimations with higher coefficient of determination (R2), lower root mean square error (RMSE) and lower bias. In comparison, for non-forest PFTs, the improvement in R2 between estimated GPP based on FPARchl1 (GPPchl1) and flux tower GPP was less evident than those between flux GPP and GPP estimations from FPARcanopy (GPPcanopy), FPARchl2, NDVI and EVI. The temperature and water attenuation scalars played important roles in reducing the difference of various GPP and indirectly reducing the impact of different FPARs on GPP in non-forest PFTs. Even so, FPARchl1 is an ecologically more meaningful parameter since FPARchl1 and flux tower GPP dropped to zero more synchronously in both forest and non-forest sites. In particular, we found that the improvement of GPPchl1 relative to GPPcanopy was positively correlated with the maximum leaf area index (LAI), implying the importance of site characteristic in regulating the strength of the improvement. This is encouraging for remote sensing of GPP for which vegetation parameter retrieval has often been found to be less successful at high LAI due to saturations in reflective and scattering domains. Our results demonstrate the significance of accurate and ecologically meaningful FPAR parameterization for improving our current capability in GPP modeling.