Abstract
Temperate forests are under climatic and economic pressures. Public bodies, NGOs and the wood industry are looking for accurate, current and affordable data driven solutions to intensify wood production while maintaining or improving long term sustainability of the production, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. Free tools and open access data have already been exploited to produce accurate quantitative forest parameters maps suitable for policy and operational purposes. These efforts have relied on different data sources, tools, and methods that are tailored for specific forest types and climatic conditions. We hypothesized we could build on these efforts in order to produce a generic method suitable to perform as well or better in a larger range of settings. In this study we focus on building a generic approach to create forest parameters maps and confirm its performance on a test site: a maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) forest located in south west of France. We investigated and assessed options related with the integration of multiple data sources (SAR L- and C-band, optical indexes and spatial texture indexes from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and ALOS-PALSAR-2), feature extraction, feature selection and machine learning techniques. On our test case, we found that the combination of multiple open access data sources has synergistic benefits on the forest parameters estimates. The sensibility analysis shows that all the data participate to the improvements, that reach up to 13.7% when compared to single source estimates. Accuracy of the estimates is as follows: aboveground biomass (AGB) 28% relative RMSE, basal area (BA) 27%, diameter at breast height (DBH) 20%, age 17%, tree density 24%, and height 13%. Forward feature selection and SVR provided the best estimates. Future work will focus on validating this generic approach in different settings. It may prove beneficial to package the method, the tools, and the integration of open access data in order to make spatially accurate and regularly updated forest structure parameters maps effortlessly available to national bodies and forest organizations.
Highlights
Forests provide several ecosystem services such as carbon storage, climate regulation, biodiversity and wood production
The results of this study confirm that open access spaceborne data, such as Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and ALOS-PALSAR mosaics, are able to provide accurate estimations of forest structure parameters and aboveground biomass (AGB)
Regular field measurements are performed to assess the financial value of forest stands
Summary
Forests provide several ecosystem services such as carbon storage, climate regulation, biodiversity and wood production. Over the past 30 years, the extent of the world’s forests has declined as human population continues to grow and its demand for food and land increases [1]. Forest changes and trends are not the same worldwide. Losses of forest area are mostly located in tropical zones, while the area of temperate forests is stable or sometimes even increasing in private and unmanaged forests [1]. The primary regions featuring temperate forests are Europe, North America, northeast Asia, Patagonia and New Zealand. With 25% of the total forest’s areas, temperate forests are a net carbon sink that hold 16% of the global plant biomass [2]
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