Clustering Arid Rangelands Based on NDVI Annual Patterns and Their Persistence

Rangeland ecosystems comprise more than a third of the global land surface, sustaining essential ecosystem services and livelihoods. In Spain, Southeast Spain includes some of the driest regions; accordingly, rangelands from Murcia and Almeria provinces were selected for this study. We used time series metrics and the Hurst Exponent from rescale range and detrended fluctuation analysis to cluster different rangeland dynamics to classify temporally and spatially diverse rangelands. The metrics were only calculated for three time periods that showed significant NDVI changes: March to April, April to July, and September to December. Detrended fluctuation analysis was not previously employed to cluster vegetation. This study used it to improve rangeland classification. K-means and unsupervised random forest were used to cluster the pixels using time series metrics and Hurst exponents. The best clustering results were obtained when unsupervised random forest was used with the Hurst exponent calculated with detrended fluctuation analysis. We used the Silhouette Index to evaluate the clustering results and a spatial comparison with topographical data. Our results show that adding the Hurst exponent, calculated with detrended fluctuation analysis, provided a better classification when clustering NDVI time series, while classifications without the Hurst exponent or with the Hurst exponent calculated with the rescale range method showed lower silhouette values. Overall, this shows the importance of using detrending when calculating the Hurst exponent on vegetation time series, and its usefulness in studying rangeland dynamics for management and research