Rasterized plant water use at Landsat resolution for Tres Rios riparian and wetland areas with seasonal estimates of greenness and evapotranspiration from 2013-2024

These spatial and tabular data were compiled to have a decade-long record of the water usage in the riparian corridor and the wetlands near Phoenix, Arizona called the Tres Rios area to observe the effect of riparian and wetland health as characterized by vegetation greenness and its water use or evapotranspiration. The objective of our study was to quantify evapotranspiration (ET, in millimeters per day) for each area, the riparian zone and the wetlands, but in this secondary Tres Rios study, we provide new ET data for the growing and dormant seasons from 2013 through 2024, along with a raster of the ET that corresponds to land cover. This objective is different from a different data release, titled, "Estimates of plant water use needs for Tres Rios wetland and riparian corridor based on Landsat greenness and evapotranspiration time series from 2013-2024, IP-179194, https://doi.org/10.5066/P1Z76FGW." These spatial data in the ET geotif raster represent polygons of land cover with specific plant species and plant community types from which we extracted time series of vegetation indices (VI) and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) using a nearby Arizona Meteorological Station, Phoenix Encanto. These tabular data represent two types of Vegetation Indices (VI), Actual Evapotranspiration (ETa) and Reference Evapotranspiration ETo time series data. Included VIs are the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) from Landsat. Landsat spectral bands were used to estimate the 2-band EVI (EVI2). ETa was calculated based on EVI and EVI2, named ET(EVI) and ET(EVI2) respectively. For its calculation Nagler’s ET empirical model was utilized. There is one time series per growing and dormant seasons for each riparian and wetland land covers for each of the names associated with the ground area verified in a mapping effort. The summary data contain the date and the corresponding values for VI, ET0 and ETa. These data were all collected for an ongoing Tres Rios area project to study water availability to maintain and sustain habitat near the City of Phoenix, Arizona. These data were created by the University of Arizona’s Vegetation Index and Phenology Lab, using surface reflectance data collected by the spaceborne mission Landsat 8 to estimate EVI2. NDVI and EVI was taken directly from the Landsat data. Later these two VIs were used to estimate ETa. ET0, and consequently ETa, was estimated from AZMET. These spatial and tabular data can be used for monitoring the health of riparian vegetation and water use trends from 2013 to 2024.