Study on the Forest Observation in Kushiro Wetland by using Pi-SAR data

1. Introduction The wetland is mostly distributed in the moist low temperature area at high latitudes. The wetland has the peat bog, which forms the accumulation of undecomposed plants. The important thing to notice is that the peat bog is similar to the aerial part of biomass in accumulating carbon. Since the amount of carbon cannot be ignored in the wetland, there is an urgent need to monitor the wetland ecosystem. The knowledge of the wetland metamorphosis obtained by observing the wetland forest change. We chose Kushiro wetland in Hokkaido as the test site. Since Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can observe continuously in any weather conditions, it is useful for observing the high humidity area such as the wetland. This paper describes some results applying multi parameter SAR data (multi-frequency,-polarization and-incidence angle) to monitor the wetland forest.