TanDEM-X & UAV data for modeling 3D vegetation information in urban areas

While 3D information on cities has been frequently assessed in recent years, this is mainly limited to the built-up area. 3D vegetation information for assessing urban ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration or cooling, for example, is missing for most cities. New data and methods for calculating vegetation characteristics including remote sensing techniques offer large benefits for addressing this lack of information. Within the ongoing project the aim is to test different state-of-the-art remote-sensing based techniques for modelling 3D vegetation in urban areas. For this purpose, different techniques for assessing vegetation parameters on two spatial scales were chosen: TanDEM-X data on a city and unmanned airborne vehicles (UAV) based 3D point cloud data on a micro scale. The aim of this paper is to present the TanDEM-X approach and preliminary findings on possibilities and challenges for assessing 3 D urban vegetation. In a first step we applied two morphological approaches to assess a normalized digital surface model (nDSM) and parameters afterwards. We were able to generate an initial DEM, DSM and nDSM, respectively.