Spectroscopic measurement of leaf water status

A leaf drying experiment was carried out in the laboratory in which simultaneous spectral reflectance in the 350-2450 nm region, and leaf weights, were measured at 10 second intervals over a 40 minute period. As the leaf water weight dropped from approximately 60 to 38%, a nearly-linear rise in reflectance at all wavelengths beyond 1000 nm was observed. A principal components analysis of the time series of spectra in the 2000-2500 nm wavelength region showed that over 99% of the variance in the spectra, that were individually scaled to have a sum equal to that of the mean spectrum and subsequently mean corrected was in the first component. This result shows that it is feasible to determine leaf water content remotely with an imaging spectrometer independent of the surface irradiance effects caused by topography