On the Estimation of Boreal Forest Biomass From TanDEM-X Data Without Training Samples

Boreal forests play an important part in the climate system, and estimates of the biomass are important also from an economic point of view. In this letter, forest aboveground biomass is estimated from bistatic TanDEM-X data, a Lidar digital elevation model (DEM), and the interferometric water cloud model, without using training samples to calibrate the model. The forest was characterized by allometric relations for area fill (vegetation fraction) and height versus stem volume, and stem volume versus biomass. Biomass was estimated for 202 forest stands at least 1 ha large at the forest test site of Remningstorp, Sweden, from 18 bistatic TanDEM-X acquisitions with a relative root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 16%-32%. TanDEM-X acquisitions with a height of ambiguity around 80 m resulted in the best results. A multitemporal combination resulted in a relative RMSE of 17%. This result is comparable with the retrieval error obtained in a previous study when training the model using a set of known forest stands.