>>Department of Ecological Modelling >> Personal homepage Thorsten Wiegand >> 

José Paruelo

José bastante contento en su oficina.

Martin Aguiar

Martín Garbulsky

Regional Analysis of NDVI indices for Northern Spain

I met Martin several years ago at the IFEVA in Buenos Aires. He was student of Jose Paruelo and wrote his thesis on "Vegetation functioning in protected ecosystems and agroecosystems of Argentina". After I gave a talk on my population viability analysis of brown bears in northern Spain (Wiegand et al. 1998) he had the idea this collaboration. My non-spatial model contains an index for food abundance (which is constructed using rainfall data), and Martin suggested that one could construct a similar index using analysis of NVDI data. This would also provide means for spatially explicit indices. We integrated analysis the seasonal and annual dynamics of the NDVI into Javier’s project. Annual summaries of different traits of the NDVI index (i.e., maximum value, annual integral) are calculated for different areas of the eastern and western population and are correlated with data on cub mortality and litter size. The aim of this procedure is to extract an index of environmental variation in resource abundance that correlates with cub mortality and litter size. In September/Oktober 2002, Martín worked with Javier at Moncho's lab at the University of Oviedo and in July/August he was guest scientist in Leipzig. Martin is now PhD student at the CREAF in Barcelona.