NDVI Forecasting Model Based on the Combination of Time Series Decomposition and CNN – LSTM

Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is the most widely used factor in the growth status of vegetation, and improving the prediction of NDVI is crucial to the advancement of regional ecology. In this study, a novel NDVI forecasting model was developed by combining time series decomposition (TSD), convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM). Two forecasting models of climatic factors and four NDVI forecasting models were developed to validate the performance of the TSD-CNN-LSTM model and investigate the NDVI's response to climatic factors. Results indicate that the TSD-CNN-LSTM model has the best prediction performance across all series, with the RMSE, NSE and MAE of NDVI prediction being 0.0573, 0.9617 and 0.0447, respectively. Furthermore, the TP-N (Temperature & Precipitation-NDVI) model has a greater effect than the T-N (Temperature-NDVI) and P-N (Precipitation-NDVI) models, according to the climatic factors-based NDVI forecasting model. Based on the results of the correlation analysis, it can be concluded that changes in NDVI are driven by a combination of temperature and precipitation, with temperature playing the most significant role. The preceding findings serve as a helpful reference and guide for studying vegetation growth in response to climate changes.