Use of airborne instruments for tropical forest monitoring applications

The world forest systems are dynamic and play an integral role in the Earth´s carbon budget. Monitoring of these valuable assets is being mandated by the international community. The requirement of global forest inventories suggests that a global measurement methodology should be adopted and that a verification and validation strategy should be accepted. The wide areas and varied forest types that need monitoring suggest the use of airborne remote sensing assets even for verification or cross validation of the varied global forest measurement methodologies. Airborne SAR systems that operate at appropriate frequencies, e.g., L-band or P-band, can provide useful forest information. The simplest forest product to generate would be a forest/non-forest classification map that can be robustly generated using radar polarimetric or interferometric systems. More elaborated products like forest classification or biomass maps require more sophisticated mapping algorithms and potentially ancillary data sets in order to obtain robust results. In this paper we examine the potential for airborne mapping system to obtain these type of forest mapping products and the limitations and accuracy of such systems.