Online available: 2025-06-26
Chlorophyll content, as a key factor influencing photosynthetic efficiency, serves as a vital indicator for vegetation health assessment. Traditional ground-based measurement methods are limited by time-consuming procedures and destructive sampling, whereas remote sensing technology enables non-destructive and efficient monitoring of leaf chlorophyll content. The establishment of a high-accuracy, strongly generalizable remote sensing estimation model for chlorophyll content is crucial for vegetation physiological monitoring and ecosystem health evaluation. Eleven field-measured datasets and one PROSPECT simulated dataset, covering multiple vegetation types and ecosystems, were employed to systematically compare the accuracy, universality, and cross-scenario transferability of chlorophyll estimation models developed using nine spectral indices and seven machine learning algorithms. Among spectral indices, the red-edge chlorophyll index (CIred-edge) demonstrated superior performance in both measured (=0.7567, nRMSE=13.73 μg/cm2, MAE=11.83 μg/cm2) and simulated datasets (=0.9578, nRMSE=5.31 μg/cm2, MAE=4.93 μg/cm2), while showing the strongest generalization capability in simulated-to-measured transfer (=0.7567, nRMSE=15.27 μg/cm2, MAE=14.36 μg/cm2). For machine learning approaches, GBRT achieved optimal accuracy and universality (=0.8172, nRMSE=11.58 μg/cm2, MAE=3.93 μg/cm2), with SVM exhibiting the best transfer learning performance between simulated and measured data (=0.8113, nRMSE=11.81 μg/cm2, MAE=4.14 μg/cm2). These results provide methodological guidance for selecting appropriate remote sensing inversion models, confirm the application potential of simulated data, and offer a practical transfer learning solution for chlorophyll monitoring in data-scarce scenarios, thereby supporting precision agriculture applications and global carbon cycle studies with cost-effective, high-precision estimation techniques.