Remote sensing of soils and vegetation: regional aspects

Professor K. Ya. Kondratyev made a significant contribution to soils and vegetation research using data from airspace observations. This paper is a brief review of the part of Kondratyev's versatile activity dealing with radiation transfer theory for the atmospheric correction of multispectral satellite images. New opportunity is outlined of remote sensing data applications developing the elaborated techniques of multispectral imagery processing. The applications are presented by classification procedures of natural objects in the processed images and by retrieval procedures of quantitative parameters of forest and other types of vegetation such as the amount of green phytomass together with discrimination of forest species (coniferous, deciduous, mixed) for each individual pixel. Some results are shown of the relevant applications for multispectral satellite images of medium and high spatial resolution.