Forest mapping of the Northern Hemisphere with spaceborne radar

Abstract

The use of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is fundamental for forest mapping and monitoring for the northern hemisphere because of non-adequate solar illumination for most of the year around and the sensitivity of the radar observables to forest structure. Past and current spaceborne SAR missions have not been designed specifically for forest monitoring. Nonetheless, in recent years a number of investigations based on the extensive datasets of archived radar images have shown that large-scale applications ranging from forest cover mapping to retrieval of forest growing stock volume / stem volume are feasible. In this paper we present an overview of results on forest mapping in Eurasia and Northern America using SAR backscatter and interferometric SAR coherence images acquired by the ERS, Envisat ASAR, JERS-1 and ALOS PALSAR sensors.