Spatial distribution pattern of dryland plants: Turing pattern in water limited conditions

The plants in the Gobi desert region are sparsely distributed on a vast bare field, it is extremely difficult to accurately observe from the satellite. For the reason, the reflectance of dry soil is very high and the reflectance of slightly distributed plants is eliminated by soil reflection. As a result, the pixel’s NDVI value of desert plants shows a smaller value than the ground measurement. In this study, we succeeded to analyze Turing pattern of vegetation abundance using the method of spectral un-mixing for satellite data of the Gobi plants. It is shown that the fraction of the vegetation endmember after pixel un-mixing has a remarkably high correlation (R2=0.51 in Landsat 8 and R2=0.41 in Sentinel 2) with the ground true value of vegetation coverage