Investigating spatial relationship between vegetation cover and soil moisture using sentinel satellites: a case study of North Gondar Zone, Ethiopia

Assessing spatial and temporal variations of soil moisture has a great role in different applications, such as natural resource management, flood-risk prediction, irrigation development, hydrology, and climatology. The current study is focusing on investigating the spatial relationship between soil moisture and vegetation cover. The Delta index model was applied using Sentinel-1 images to estimate soil moisture, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index was applied using Sentinel-2 images to assess vegetation cover. Besides, regression analysis was conducted to investigate the spatial relationship between soil moisture and vegetation cover. The derived soil moisture ranges from 0% to 48.4811%. Most areas with high elevation had high soil moisture, and low elevation had low soil moisture. In most part of the study area, vegetation cover and soil moisture have a direct relationship. Thus, higher vegetation cover was observed in areas with higher soil moisture; and lower vegetation cover was observed in areas with lower soil moisture.