EFFECTS OF TOPOGRAPHIC CORRECTION ON NATURAL FOREST REFLECTANCE IN A MOUNTAINOUS REGION OF SOUTHERN BRAZIL.

Rugged terrain may be a major source of distortions on signals recorded by imaging sensors, compromising a series of remote sensing applications. To compensate for these distortions, Topographic Corrections (TC) methods have been developed. Although some methods are discussed and recommended by the literature, their usage is hampered by the lack of implementation on geospatial and remote sensing software. Alternatives would be open source applications and programming languages. This paper provides an overview on TC methods readily available in the R package “landsat”. We evaluated the effects of seven algorithms on the reflectance of natural forest remnants recorded by the OLI sensor (Landsat 8). Among all evaluated methods the C-Correction presented the best performance, reducing terrain influence and spectral variability. Several methods failed to compensate for terrain influence on reflectance. The results highlight the potential of TC methods and instigate further investigation on this topic.