Paper
19 November 2012 Measuring forest canopy height using ICESat/GLAS data for applying to Japanese spaceborne lidar mission
Masato Hayashi, Nobuko Saigusa, Hiroyuki Oguma, Yoshiki Yamagata, Gen Takao, Haruo Sawada, Kohei Mizutani, Nobuo Sugimoto, Kazuhiro Asai
Author Affiliations +
Proceedings Volume 8526, Lidar Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring XIII; 85260M (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.981583
Event: SPIE Asia-Pacific Remote Sensing, 2012, Kyoto, Japan
Abstract
We developed a methodology to estimate the canopy height from the ICESat/GLAS waveform for the purpose of contributing to the design of the Japanese spaceborne LiDAR mission; iss-jem LiDAR for Observation of Vegetation Environment (i-LOVE). We adopted an estimation method using a terrain index, which indicates the steepness of ground surface, to accurately estimate the canopy height in sloped areas. The study area is Hokkaido Island. We conducted a ground survey and collected airborne LiDAR data to use as the ground truth for the canopy height. We then developed some models to estimate the canopy height from a GLAS waveform. As a result, the estimation accuracy decreased in steep sloped areas where the terrain index exceeded 15 m. To reduce the influence of this effect, the estimation equation was separated for a gentle slope (terrain index ≤ 15 m) and a steep slope (terrain index < 15 m). In this case, RMSE was 3 to 5 m. These findings indicated that an accurate estimation method would be ensured by using a footprint of less than 15 m of terrain index for the i-LOVE mission. On the assumption of a forested area located primarily at less than a 30° surface slope on a global scale, it is recommended that the diameter of the i-LOVE footprint should be less than 25 m. i- LOVE is planned to transmit four laser pulses arranged at 2×2 simultaneously. This characteristic of i-LOVE, which does not require DEM, makes it possible to calculate the terrain index accurately and has a large advantage for accurately estimating the canopy height on a global scale.
© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Masato Hayashi, Nobuko Saigusa, Hiroyuki Oguma, Yoshiki Yamagata, Gen Takao, Haruo Sawada, Kohei Mizutani, Nobuo Sugimoto, and Kazuhiro Asai "Measuring forest canopy height using ICESat/GLAS data for applying to Japanese spaceborne lidar mission", Proc. SPIE 8526, Lidar Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring XIII, 85260M (19 November 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.981583
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KEYWORDS
LIDAR

Data modeling

Data acquisition

Error analysis

Statistical analysis

Statistical methods

Environmental sensing

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