Near-surface remote sensing techniques including hyperspectral sensors are essential monitoring tools to provide spatial and temporal resolution. More frequent and finer scale observations help to monitor specific plant communities and accurately time the phenological stages of vegetation and snow cover, A Hyperspectral field sensor (FloX) was installed as an integral part of an automatic system for monitoring vegetation and environmental seasonal changes (phenology) on Svalbard (AsMoVEn) funded by SIOS. The fluorescence box (FloX) is a unique instrument, enabling continuous observation of sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF). FLoX measures spectral data of extremely high resolution, The FloX is specifically designed to passively measure chlorophyll fluorescence under natural light conditions. The core of the system is the QEPro spectrometer from Ocean Optics covering the Red/Near Infrared region (650 – 800 nm) with a spectral resolution (FWHM) of 0.3 nm. This is the spectral range where chlorophyll fluorescence is emitted and where the two atmospheric oxygen absorption bands (O2B and O2A, at 689 nm and 760 nm respectively) are used to measure it. The FLoX has an additional spectrometer measuring in visible and NIR-region (400– 950 nm) with a spectral resolution (FWHM) of 1.5 nm allowing extraction of different vegetation indices from the visible and near-infrared region.
