In order to study forests at the global scale, a detailed link budget for a lidar system onboard satellite is presented. It is based on an original approach coupling airborne lidar observations and an end-to-end simulator. The simulator is initialized by airborne lidar measurements performed over temperate and tropical forests on the French territory, representing a wide range of forests ecosys...

Water-land interfaces develop such heterogeneous ecological niches that the natural capital, deeply correlated with biodiversity, of these biotopes embodies one of the most important on earth. In these systems, widely dispersed field or ship-based observations and lack of broad scale data have historically precluded quantification of large-scale patterns and processes and hindered management ef...

The study presents a novel method for delineation of tree crowns and detection of stem positions of single trees from dense airborne LIDAR data. The core module of the method is a surface reconstruction that robustly interpolates the canopy height model (CHM) from the LIDAR data. Tree segments are found by applying the watershed algorithm to the CHM. Possible stem positions of the tallest trees...

We tested metrics from full-waveform (FW) LiDAR (light detection and ranging) as predictors for forest basal area (BA) and aboveground biomass (AGB), in a tropical moist forest. Three levels of metrics are tested: (i) peak-level, based on each return echo; (ii) pulse-level, based on the whole return signal from each emitted pulse; and (iii) plot-level, simulating a large footprint LiDAR dataset...

[1] Exchange of carbon between forests and the atmosphere is a vital component of the global carbon cycle. Satellite laser altimetry has a unique capability for estimating forest canopy height, which has a direct and increasingly well understood relationship to aboveground carbon storage. While the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) onboard the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICE...

Indonesian peatlands are one of the largest near-surface pools of terrestrial organic carbon. Persistent logging, drainage and recurrent fires lead to huge emission of carbon each year. Since tropical peatlands are highly inaccessible, few measurements on peat depth and forest biomass are available. We assessed the applicability of quality filtered ICESat/GLAS (a spaceborne LiDAR system) data t...