Title
Estimates of Forest Growing Stock Volume for Sweden, Central Siberia, and Québec Using Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar Backscatter Data
Abstract
A study was undertaken to assess Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) ScanSAR data for quantifying forest growing stock volume (GSV) across three boreal regions with varying forest types, composition, and structure (Sweden, Central Siberia, and Quebec). Estimates of GSV were obtained using hyper-temporal observations of the radar backscatter acquired by Envisat ASAR with the BIOMASAR algorithm. In total, 5.310(6) km(2) were mapped with a 0.01 degrees pixel size to obtain estimates representative for the year of 2005. Comparing the SAR-based estimates to spatially explicit datasets of GSV, generated from forest field inventory and/or Earth Observation data, revealed similar spatial distributions of GSV. Nonetheless, the weak sensitivity of C-band backscatter to forest structural parameters introduced significant uncertainty to the estimated GSV at full resolution. Further discrepancies were observed in the case of different scales of the ASAR and the reference GSV and in areas of fragmented landscapes. Aggregation to 0.1 degrees and 0.5 degrees was then undertaken to generate coarse scale estimates of GSV. The agreement between ASAR and the reference GSV datasets improved; the relative difference at 0.5 degrees was consistently within a magnitude of 20-30%. The results indicate an improvement of the characterization of forest GSV in the boreal zone with respect to currently available information.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.3390/rs5094503
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
SAR backscatter,Envisat ASAR,growing stock volume,boreal forest,Sweden,Siberia,Quebec,BIOMASAR algorithm
Magnitude (mathematics),Advanced synthetic aperture radar,Radar backscatter,Backscatter,Remote sensing,Taiga,Earth observation,Pixel,Geology,Boreal
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
5
9
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.60
6
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Maurizio Santoro125632.26
Oliver Cartus2365.23
Johan E. S. Fransson325537.93
Anatoly Shvidenko471.62
Ian McCallum516218.03
Ronald J. Hall6142.62
André Beaudoin720696.32
Christian Beer871.28
Christiane Schmullius99020.83