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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2011

  • Title: Forest Structure and Remote Sensing Studies at the Harvard Forest
  • Primary Author: Paul Siqueira (University of Massachusetts - Amherst )
  • Abstract:

    As part of an ongoing effort to utilize remote sensing methods to estimate forest three dimensional structure and biomass, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, in collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mt. Holyoke College and Boston University, has been collecting ground validation and remote sensing (SAR, InSAR, lidar and optical) data over the Harvard forest as part of a NASA funded project since 2009. A fundamental building block of the work that our team has been performing has been the establishment of fifteen one-hectare plots, meant to cover regions of the Harvard Forest area that are nearly uniform in their ground cover. Within each of these fifteen plots, sixteen 25x25m subplots were established, where within each, the diameter at breast height, species and a live/dead determination was made for each tree larger than 4 cm in diameter. In all, more than 10,000 trees were catalogued in the July/August time period of 2009. At this same time, an L-band (1.2 GHz) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR, operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) imaged the area, as did a downward looking full waveform lidar (LVIS, operated by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center), collected remote sensing data that could be used for inferring the biomass and vegetation three-dimensional structure, for the purpose of developing algorithms which could be applied to spaceborne sensors with similar capabilities. Our group is now processing this data and using it to make maps of vegetation height, density and biomass for the larger Harvard Forest region.

  • Research Category: Regional Studies