Using airborne & space lidars for large-area inventory

NASA plans to launch two space lidar missions over the next decade, and at least one proposal for a space lidar is being considered by the European Space Agency. All designs call for single-beam or multi-beam profiling systems. These space ranging systems, like the ICESat/GLAS lidar that collected over 1.91 billion waveforms between January 2003 and October 2009, must necessarily be used as sampling tools to characterize vegetation cover and to estimate forest volume, biomass, and carbon globally. Recent investigations conducted by these authors have centered on developing, testing, and refining statistical approaches that can incorporate airborne and space lidar acquisitions to inventory large areas.