Research progress in grassland fractional coverage estimation methods

As an important ecological variable, the grassland fractional coverage is used in meteorological and ecological analysis and modeling. The precision of the grassland fractional coverage estimation deeply affects the precision of related studies. A number of methods which are used to estimate the grassland fractional coverage and the different opinions were reviewed and analyzed. Focusing on the remote sensing technology, the existing remote sensing based estimating methods were reclassified in order to clear the basic thoughts for estimating the grassland fractional coverage. Moreover, the features, advantage and shortage of each method were analyzed as well.