Remote sensing is an established technique in environmental studies. First of all, this concerns soil-vegetation ecosystems where the availability of means for vegetation monitoring, stress detection and state assessment is of great importance. A significant amount of research has been performed to develop efficient methods for monitoring of vegetation dynamics. A prevailing part of the works is devoted to the use of multispectral data transformations (vegetation indices) such as spectral bands ratios and linear combinations in order to estimate vegetation parameters. The dependence of vegetation spectral features in the visible and near infrared bands on plant biomass, chlorophyll content, canopy cover, etc. lies at the root of this approach.

In this paper we report some results of the colorimetrical analysis of vegetation spectral data. The work was conducted in order to reveal plant senescence effects due to plant growth or stress factors and the impact of the soil background on vegetation reflectance. One of the goals of the study was to evaluate the potential of various colorimetric features for vegetation assessment. Another objective was to compare this approach to the results of the implementation of vegetation indices for plant bioparameters retrieval from multispectral data. The integration of both methods was examined as well showing good predictive capabilities.