Canopy Height, Crown Cover, and Aboveground Standing Live Biomass in the Southwestern United States from MISR, 2000 and 2009.
Mark
James
Chopping, Montclair State University, chopping@pegasus.montclair.edu
(Presenting)
Sawahiko
Shimada, Montclair State University/Tokyo University of Agriculture, shimadas@mail.montclair.edu
Michael
Bull, NASA/JPL, michael.a.bull@jpl.nasa.gov
John
Martonchik, NASA/JPL, john.v.martonchik@jpl.nasa.gov
An important carbon cycle science question is “How are the Earth’s carbon cycle and ecosystems changing and what are the consequences for the Earth’s carbon budget, ecosystem sustainability, and biodiversity?” To address these questions, we must know the distribution of aboveground woody carbon stocks; how much, where, and why woody C stocks are changing; and how much of the annual net flux from land is the result of disturbance and recovery? To try to address these questions for the southwestern United States, mean canopy height, crown cover, and aboveground standing live biomass maps were constructed for the years 2000 and 2009 using MISR red band radiance data in all cameras, mapped onto a 250 m grid and interpreted through inversion of a geometric-optical (GO) model with injection of a dynamic background. The MISR data used were from selected May 15 - June 15 Terra overpasses and ~400 million bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) and GO model inversions were performed (235.8 million 250 m^2 cells). The maps were assessed at specific locations where large changes are known to have occurred over the period (the Rodeo-Chediski Fire in Arizona; mountain pine beetle mortality in Colorado) and at the intensively studied Teakettle Experimental Forest in the Sierra Nevada, California. The biomass maps were compared with the U.S. Forest Service biomass map for 2002, LVIS height data, and estimates from high resolution imagery. Crown cover and mean canopy height are retrieved with a MISR/GO approach with no scaling, not through fitting or training. Accuracy is good but precision is lower than desired over this large region. The main limiting factor is the derivation and specification of coefficients used to predict the background contribution over large areas. This can be addressed using estimates of crown cover from high resolution imagery and lidar canopy height data.
Presentation Type: Poster
Poster Session: Carbon Cycle Science
NASA TE Funded Awards Represented:
Chopping, Mark
A new approach for mapping woody plants in the southwestern United States using NASA Earth Observing System Data