Tropical Peatland Identification Using L-band Full Polarimetric Alos Palsar: a Case Study in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Tropical peatland has been subjected to rapid economic development which causing harms to its ecosystem and altering its function from carbon storage to carbon emitter. Therefore, sustainable management of tropical peatland is necessary to control global carbon balance. As an initial step to actualize the sustainable management of tropical peatland, reliable monitoring technique is needed. Remote sensing is suitable to be used in tropical peatland monitoring activities whereas the direct measurements are generally labor intensive and limited to accessibility. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers cloud-free observation for tropical peatland monitoring in humid tropic areas. However, there are few studies on developing tropical peatland identification methodology by using L-Band full polarimetric SAR data. In this study, a methodology to identify tropical peatland has been developed by taking advantage of L-Band full polarimetric ALOS (Advanced Land Observation Satellite) PALSAR (Phased Array type L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar) data on two study areas in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Thus, three Polarimetric Decomposition (PD) theorems and Radar Vegetation Index (RVI) were evaluated to examine the characteristic of tropical peatland in the view point of L-Band full polarimetric SAR. The result showed that shrub class derived from unsupervised classification of polarimetric parameters of Freeman-Durden decomposition integrated with a certain interval of RVI were successfully identified tropical peatland. In addition, overall accuracy of 73.6% and 75.2% were obtained for study area 1 and 2 respectively. These results indicate that L-Band full polarimetric SAR is useful for tropical peatland monitoring activity in response to the global climate change mitigation scheme.