A study of the relationship between radar backscatter and regenerating tropical forest biomass for spaceborne SAR instruments.

Abstract: INTRODUCTION Increasingly, the monitoring of forest condition and productivity requires better spatial context, more detail and higher temporal resolution, if we are to be able to visualise key environmental or biodiversity indicators and their changes across space and time. For the accurate prediction of how changes in climate, forest condition or land-use can impact large-scale hydrological processes, researchers and water managers are also faced with the need to extrapolate patch-scale measurements to whole catchments or river basin scales. This is especially challenging across large, often inaccessible areas or where the ground information available is sparse and where the costs and effort required in setting up a dedicated, sufficiently dense network of ground-based sampling sites are very high. Although not always measuring the required hydrological variables directly, remote sensing techniques can provide valuable information about the spatial variability of key surface characteristics across large scales. For this reason it is often used as a cost-effective mechanism for extrapolation of point-based measurements, or as a constraint for hydrological model outputs. The key to the effective use of this type of data, in conjunction with hydrological models, lies in the recognition of the characteristics and trade-offs found in the different forms of remotely sensed derived variables, and how they can be used to complement ground-based hydrological measurements effectively. Up to now, mostly broad-band, low resolution remotely sensed data have been used as input and constraints for regional/ continental hydrology and productivity models (e.g. Running and Coughlan, 1988; Schultz and Engman, 2000).

TL;DR: The objective of this study was to analyze the L-band SAR backscatter sensitivity to forest biomass for Eucalyptus plantations and showed that the radar signal is highly dependent on biomass only for values lower than 50 t/ha, which corresponds to plantations of approximately three years of age.

TL;DR: This research seeks to exploit the property of vegetation density that causes the radar response to saturate such that vegetation that is more dense than some threshold is indistinguishable from each other, and classify the data into several classes for use in class-specific biomass estimates.

TL;DR: In this article, an approach to estimate the above ground biomass (AGB) to assess the total carbon stock of forest cover present in Ramgarh district using remote sensing and GIS techniques is presented.

TL;DR: In this paper, a strategie d'estimation de la biomasse totale au-dessus du sol a ete elaboree pour les forets tropicales is presented.

TL;DR: The literature on tropical secondary forests, defined as those resulting from human disturbance (e.g., logged forests and forest fallows), is reviewed to address questions related to their extent, rates of formation, ecological characteristics, values and uses to humans, and potential for management as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The purpose of this book is to reveal to the interested (but perhaps mathematically unsophisticated) user the foundations and major features of several basic methods for curve and surface fitting that are currently in use.

TL;DR: These Amazon ecosystems generally can recover after large-scale pasture disturbances and only where land has been used too intensively for long periods is reforestation uncertain, but probably less than 10% of the pasture land in northern Para has degraded to this level.