Estimation of Forest Biomass Patterns across Northeast China Based on Allometric Scale Relationship

This study develops a modeling framework for utilizing the large footprint LiDAR waveform data from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) onboard NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MODIS) imagery, meteorological data, and forest measurements for monitoring stocks of total biomass (including aboveground biomass and root biomass). The forest tree height models were separately used according to the artificial neural network (ANN) and the allometric scaling and resource limitation (ASRL) tree height models which can both combine the climate data and satellite data to predict forest tree heights. Based on the allometric approach, the forest aboveground biomass model was developed from the field measured aboveground biomass data and the tree heights derived from two tree height models. Then, the root biomass should scale with the aboveground biomass. To investigate whether this approach is efficient for estimating forest total biomass, we used Northeast China as the object of study. Our results generally proved that the method proposed in this study could be meaningful for forest total biomass estimation (R2 = 0.699, RMSE = 55.86).