Vertical Forest Sructure Estimation by Means of Multi-baseline Pol-insar at L-band for Global Biomass Mapping Potential & Lidar Synergies

A central parameter of the terrestrial carbon budget is forest biomass which represents a proxy for the stored carbon. Despite its crucial role in the terrestrial carbon budget, forest biomass is poorly quantified across most parts of the planet due to the great difficulties in measuring biomass on the ground and consistently aggregating measurements across scales. Today’s information is largely based on ground measurements on a plot basis and for many regions is still missing. Accurate and reliable estimation of forest biomass is today one of the “hot topics” within the radar and lidar remote sensing communities. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a new approach for biomass estimation based on the estimation of the forest vertical structure. Biomass a Function of Vertical Structure and Height In [7] a method for biomass estimation using the allometric relationship between biomass and forest height is described. 58 . 1 H 66 . 1 B Eq.1 B is the Biomass in Mg/ha and H the forest top height. This method provides reliable results for closed canopy forest systems without strong density variations. However, changes in forest density and structure caused for example by tree species composition, management system or disturbances introduce deviations in vertical structure. With increasing horizontal and/or vertical forest heterogeneity the variance of the biomass height relationship increases. An extension of the height to biomass allometry has been recently proposed in terms of vertical structure information