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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2008

  • Title: SAR, InSAR and Lidar Studies for Measuring Vegetation Structure Over the Harvard Forest Region
  • Primary Author: Paul Siqueira (University of Massachusetts - Amherst )
  • Abstract:

    In 2007, the National Research Council issued a report of recommendations for the next decade of earth observing observations to be made from space. Among those recommendations was the need for quantifying carbon stores held in the world’s vegetation and characterization of species habitats through the measure of vegetation structure, both horizontal (on a hectare-to-hectaare scale) and vertical (to a meter-level accuracy). The identified spaceborne mission, named DESDynI, would be a combined lidar and L-band SAR/InSAR mission with the lidar providing a method for the sampling of vegetation vertical profiles to high resolution over a limited swath and the radar for interpolating from the lidar observations to make the necessary large-area maps of vegetation structure over regional and continental scales.



    The work described in this abstract and poster illustrates one of the preliminary studies ongoing for this mission using available data and resources from the Harvard Forest. That is, full waveform lidar data collected from NASA’s Goddard Center in 2003 using the Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS) for determining the true ground elevation and the vertical extent of the canopy over a 30 kha area (9 km x 30 km), and many L-band SAR/repeat-pass InSAR observations made available from the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and the Kyoto and Carbon Cycle Initiative since the launch of the ALOS satellite in 2006. This rich and consistent data set, has provided an opportunity to explore relationships between the SAR, InSAR and lidar data, to better understand methods of combining these fundamental data sources for studying the ecosystems, carbon balance and vegetation three-dimensional structure in the Harvard region and to extrapolate the results as they would apply to a spaceborne mission such as DESDynI.



    The figure shows five types of remote sensing data collected over the Harvard Forest. These are: i.) differential interferometry (large background image), ii.) fully polarimetric backscatter power corrected for slope effects (red-hh; green-hv; blue-vv), the DEM (large center image), and lidar vegetation height data (yellow). A colorbar indicated values for the various products. SAR and InSAR data are collected by JAXA’s ALOS/PALSAR, L-band SAR with a 46 day repeat, SRTM C-band interferometer, and NASA GSFC’s LVIS vegetation lidar.



  • Research Category: International Research Projects

  • Figures:
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