SAR Interferometric Approaches for the Analysis of Structural Forest Parameters: State of the Art and Perspectives for Brazilian Studies

This paper presents three practical examples of airborne InSAR data application to improve the knowledge of forest structures. Two experiments were done in the Amazon tropical forest to study the spatial distribution of VLTs in the primary forest using LM filtering and a series of Markov processes and others, to map and model the estimation of biomass variations in primary and secondary forests. The third experiment refers to the relation of SAR data and the volumetric configuration of Eucalyptus sp. stands. The advances on the analysis of PolInSAR data are very helpful to increase, in the near future, the regional inventorying of land cover changes in the Brazilian territory.