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Integration of long term Landsat observations with DESDynI measurements for monitoring terrestrial carbon fluxes within and beyond the DESDynI mission
Project Funding: 2009 - 2013
NRA: 2008 NASA: Terrestrial Ecology
Funded by NASA
Abstract:A key element of climate change studies is to understand past and current global carbon budget and predict its future trend. Currently this is hindered by a lack of good understanding of the various carbon pools and the fluxes among them. The primary goal of this project is to improve estimates of terrestrial carbon pools and associated fluxes using integrated assessment approaches that combine long term Landsat observations, direct structure and biomass measurements from the planned DESDynI, and ecosystem modeling. Specifically, we seek to: (1) Develop an approach for integrating age estimates and multispectral trajectories from the Landsat record with anticipated height observations from DESDynI to map height, biomass and biomass changes across the landscape through time. (2) Assess the spatial and temporal variability of biomass dynamics over the 5-year DESDynI mission length at various spatial scales to quantify expected disturbance and growth rates from which required measurement accuracies for DESDynI may be determined. (3) Integrate age structure maps from Landsat with height and biomass products developed through Landsat/DESDynI fusion to improve and validate ecosystem model estimates of terrestrial carbon flux. (4) Scale up our Landsat-DESDynI integration approach to produce spatially and temporally resolved, state level assessment of biomass dynamics for nearly four decades, and use these products to drive ecosystem model estimates of carbon flux. Our methodological approach will first relate Landsat disturbance time series products from NAFD, including age and multispectral trajectories to lidar-derived heights from ICESAT and the Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS). These will then be used to produce a time series of height and biomass maps for the Landsat record which will be compared with measured differences in biomass. Once validated the approach will be scaled to larger areas, namely, North Carolina and Maryland. Next, we will pick several 5 year periods from our Landsat record, and use the derived maps of height and biomass to assess real-world variability in the dynamics of each of these across various spatial scales. This will help determine the magnitude of the changes in height and biomass DESDynI can be expected to encounter, and help define its required measurement sensitivities through time and across space. Finally, we will explore methods for integrating these height and age products into the ecosystem models, in particular the Ecosystem Demography (ED) model. We will scale our approach upwards by using the ED model to predict flux over the larger areas in North Carolina and Maryland.
Publications:
Ling, P., Baiocchi, G., Huang, C. 2015. Estimating annual influx of carbon to harvested wood products linked to forest management activities using remote sensing. Climatic Change. 134(1-2), 45-58. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-015-1510-3
Huang, C., Goward, S. N., Masek, J. G., Thomas, N., Zhu, Z., Vogelmann, J. E. 2010. An automated approach for reconstructing recent forest disturbance history using dense Landsat time series stacks. Remote Sensing of Environment. 114(1), 183-198. DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2009.08.017
Huang, C., Thomas, N., Goward, S. N., Masek, J. G., Zhu, Z., Townshend, J. R. G., Vogelmann, J. E. 2010. Automated masking of cloud and cloud shadow for forest change analysis using Landsat images. International Journal of Remote Sensing. 31(20), 5449-5464. DOI: 10.1080/01431160903369642
2015 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)
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):