Pantropical Alos/palsar Database in Support of Forest Carbon Tracking

The progress at the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties 15 (COP15) to include the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in the post-Kyoto UNFCCC agreement manifested the demand for reliable remote sensing data streams to support tropical nation’s establishment of measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems to track forest carbon. ALOS/PALSAR has emerged as an invaluable data source to ingest into MRV data streams, largely due to its annual global wall-to-wall strategic data acquisition supporting fine-resolution mapping of deforestation and forest degradation rates, which can feed into biomass estimators directly derived from fusion of remote sensing and field data, and emission estimates when coupled with carbon stock maps or emissions models ([1]-[5]). This paper reports on progress in the compilation of a consistent pan-tropical ALOS/PALSAR database where 16,000 ALOS dual-polarimetric fine-beam (FBD) PALSAR scenes were orthorectified and radiometrically processed. Focus in the data compilation was to construct a pan-tropical database from the first available dual-polarimetric data acquired since in 2007 to form a baseline data base to compare with subsequent observations.