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Detecting Changes of Forest Biomass from Fusion of Radar and Lidar: Developing DESDynl measurement requirements
Project Funding: 2009 - 2012
NRA: 2008 NASA: Terrestrial Ecology
Funded by NASA
Abstract:Vegetation biomass, the quantity of living matter, is a fundamental parameter characterising the biosphere. Despite its crucial nature, biomass is poorly quantified across most parts of the planet due to the great difficulties in measuring it on the ground and consistently aggregating available measurements across scales. Obtaining spatially explicit measurement of biomass and its changes due to human and climate perturbations is important for understanding and quantifying the global carbon cycle and its dynamics. In a recent study, the National Research Council (NRC) Decadal Survey recommended the active remote sensing sensors (radar and lidar) as NASA's DESDynl mission concept to provide these measurements. Distribution of vegetation biomass stock and the annual changes from disturbance and recovery are recommended as two important variables to quantify global terrestrial carbon sinks and sources.The overall goal of this project is to assess the capability of these active sensors to detect changes in aboveground vegetation biomass in temperate and tropical forests, without necessarily estimating the biomass stock. Our study will focus on three study areas covering a range of ecosystem structure and stages of disturbance and biomass accumulation. We propose to develop a data fusion methodology and change detection algorithm by combining radar measurements from ALOS PALSAR and airborne lidar (LVIS) with extensive field measurements, and ecosystem modeling techniques to address two questions:
2013 NASA Terrestrial Ecology Science Team Meeting Poster(s)
2011 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)
2010 NASA Terrestrial Ecology Science Team Meeting Poster(s)
More details may be found in the following project profile(s):