Assessment of Vegetation Vigor Using Integrated Synthetic Aperture Radars
Vegetation health is dependent on various biophysical, geographical, and meteorological factors. The floral biomass can be used as the proxy for vegetation vigor. Accurate and precise assessment of biomass is henceforth important for specifying the health
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Abstract Vegetation health is dependent on various biophysical, geographical, and meteorological factors. The floral biomass can be used as the proxy for vegetation vigor. Accurate and precise assessment of biomass is henceforth important for specifying the health of vegetation that is indicative of a collection of several environmental factors. Remote sensing has currently emerged to be the most important and widely utilized tool for biomass assessment. Synthetic Aperture Radars (SARs) offer more accurate forest biomass estimates than optical multispectral remote sensing due to the absence of distinctive intrinsic characteristics of radars. The capability of multi-polarized COSMO-Skymed (X-band), Radarsat-2 (C-band), and ALOS PALSAR (L-band) was investigated for biomass retrieval in a moist tropical virgin forest landscape of India. Backscatter values generated from the raw SAR images were correlated with field above-ground biomass (AGB) values and were modeled using Multiple Linear Regression analysis to generate best-fit models for AGB estimates with single and combined frequencies of X-, C-, and L-bands. The integrated model for AGB estimation involving X-, C-, and L-bands achieved an accuracy of 75.3% with r2 ¼ 0.90 and RMSE ¼ 15.29 t/ha. On validating the abovesaid models, the integrated model involving X-, C-, and L-bands showed the best results among all other models with r2 ¼ 0.95, RMSE ¼ 14.81 t/ha, and data agreement of 0.95. Most of the biomass ranged within 125 Mg/ha in the study site. Hence, the study presents a suitable approach in assessing vegetation vigor from AGB from SAR, thus contributing to the ecological and forestry realms. Keywords Synthetic aperture radar · Multi-frequency · Polarization · Backscatter · Deciduous forest · Biomass
S. Sinha (*) Department of Geography, Amity Institute of Social Sciences, Amity University Kolkata, Kolkata, West Bengal, India e-mail: [email protected] © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. Kumar et al. (eds.), Remote Sensing and GIScience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55092-9_3
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1 Introduction The health of forest is reflected by its biomass. The biomass is the most vital ingredient in understanding the carbon cycle and conveys information related to climate change and forest health or vigor (Sinha et al. 2018a). Vegetation with higher biomass content is generally considered to have greater vigor than that having lower biomass level. Biomass also serves as an indicator of carbon concentration that is stored in floral species and released into atmosphere during forest fires (Sharma et al. 2012). The concentration of atmospheric carbon is ever-increasing and the global carbon dioxide (CO2) level crossed the critical mark of 400 ppm during 2016, an irreversible phenomenon called “400 ppm World” (Sinha and Santra 2019). The Earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration has surpassed 415 ppm ever since humans came into existence in millions of years during the first half of
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