ERS SAR images for tropical rainforest and land use monitoring: change detection over five years and comparison with RADARSAT and JERS SAR images

Presents results gathered from the project “Tropical Rainforest and Use of Land Investigation” project-TRULI, which was sponsored by the German Space Agency (DARA), ESA/ESRIN and ADRO deploying data from the European ERS-1R, the Canadian RADARSAT and JERS between 1993 and 1998. The focus is on the possibilities of monitoring deforestation in the wet tropics from space by means of visual interpretation of RGB images derived from texture filtering techniques. This method has already successfully been employed in Kalimantan, Indonesia, for monitoring land use changes over a five-year period using ERS-1/2 data. Canada´s RADARSAT offers quite a promising perspective for forest monitoring because its fine beam mode enables imaging at a high spatial resolution