Abstract
This letter evaluates the biomass-retrieval error in pine-dominated stands when using high-spatial-resolution airborne measurements from fully polarimetric L-band radar and airborne laser scanning sensors. Information on total above-ground biomass was estimated through allometric relationships from plot-level field measurements. Multiple-linear-regression models were developed to model relationships between biomass and radar/lidar data. Overall, lidar data provided lower estimation errors (17.2 t · ha-1, 28% relative) when compared with radar data (30.3 t · ha-1, 61% relative). However, for the 30-100 t · ha-1 biomass range, the relative error from radar-based models was only 9% higher than that from lidar-based models. This suggests that high-spatial-resolution radar data could provide fundamentally similar results to lidar for some biomass intervals. This is an important finding for large-scale biomass estimation that needs to rely upon satellite data, as there are no lidar satellites planned for the foreseeable future.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 6583278 |
| Pages (from-to) | 711-715 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Keywords
- Biomass
- L-band radar
- Small-footprint lidar