Continental wide assessment of vegetation cover anomalies from time series of satellite products

Vegetation cover plays a key role in various biophysical processes related to terrestrial ecosystems and global climate. In this chapter we review the main concepts and techniques for monitoring vegetation conditions at continental scale using time series of satellite optical observations. A new approach based on a synthetic indicator of anomalies in vegetated land cover is also presented. This indicator is obtained by aggregating through the use of fuzzy sets theory the contributions from several factors derived from the analysis of time series of satellite products. The application of the method in the detection of anomalous conditions over the African continent is presented.