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The Global Forest Biomass Inventory
Sean
P
Healey, USDA Forest Service, seanhealey@fs.fed.us
(Presenter)
Erik
Lindquist, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, erik.lindquist@fao.org
Paul
Patterson, USDA Forest Service, plpatterson@fs.fed.us
Sassan
Saatchi, CALTECH/JPL, saatchi@jpl.nasa.gov
Michael
Lefsky, Colorado State, lefsky@cnr.colostate.edu
Michael
Hernandez, Weber State University, mhernandez@weber.edu
Alicia
Peduzzi, USDA Forest Service, apeduzzi@fs.fed.us
The density of biomass stored in a county’s forest is an important component of international carbon accounting, and is a central consideration for the United Nations REDD+ initiative. Many countries still rely upon international defaults when reporting forest biomass density, and even among countries with well-developed national forest inventories, important methodological differences exist. The Global Forest Biomass Inventory (GFBI) is a NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) pilot activity designed to produce consistent, national-level estimates of forest biomass density in support of the 2015 Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO). GFBI makes use of the relatively strong relationship between aboveground forest biomass and global canopy height measures derived from the GLAS platform. While several studies use this relationship to “train” wall-to-wall maps and then derive estimates by simply adding up pixels, GFBI uses a sub-sample of GLAS measurements in a model-based inference context to develop statistical estimates similar to those produced by most national forest inventories. Although this approach does not produce a map, its grounding in sampling theory produces uncertainties that are more easily and clearly stated than for most remotely sensed assessments.
GFBI relies upon a tremendous amount of international sharing of ground data for model parameterization. The UN FRA is coordinating much of this data-sharing, with help from Silvacarbon (the US contribution to the GEO forest carbon tracking task). Several countries have already made available their national forest inventories for this purpose, and GFBI is currently sorting through hundreds of thousands of field plots for those which are spatially co-located with GLAS shots. Concurrently, GIS work is under way to identify the optimal statistically legitimate sub-sample of GLAS shots for each country. Estimates are already available for some countries, and global analysis should be complete within a year.
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 1-A
(Tue 11:00 AM)
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 42
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