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Estimating Canopy Gap Fraction Using ICESat GLAS within Australian Forest Ecosystems
Remote Sensing, Volume: 9, Issue: 1, Start page: 59
Swansea University Author: Natascha Kljun
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PDF | Author's Original
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.
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DOI (Published version): 10.3390/rs9010059
Abstract
Spaceborne laser altimetry waveform estimates of canopy Gap Fraction (GF) vary withrespect to discrete return airborne equivalents due to their greater sensitivity to reflectance differencesbetween canopy and ground surfaces resulting from differences in footprint size, energy thresholding,noise cha...
Published in: | Remote Sensing |
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ISSN: | 2072-4292 |
Published: |
2017
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Online Access: |
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URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa31620 |
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Abstract: |
Spaceborne laser altimetry waveform estimates of canopy Gap Fraction (GF) vary withrespect to discrete return airborne equivalents due to their greater sensitivity to reflectance differencesbetween canopy and ground surfaces resulting from differences in footprint size, energy thresholding,noise characteristics and sampling geometry. Applying scaling factors to either the ground or canopyportions of waveforms has successfully circumvented this issue, but not at large scales. This studydevelops a method to scale spaceborne altimeter waveforms by identifying which remotely-sensedvegetation, terrain and environmental attributes are best suited to predicting scaling factors basedon an independent measure of importance. The most important attributes were identified as: soilphosphorus and nitrogen contents, vegetation height, MODIS vegetation continuous fields productand terrain slope. Unscaled and scaled estimates of GF are compared to corresponding ALS datafor all available data and an optimized subset, where the latter produced most encouraging results(R2 = 0.89, RMSE = 0.10). This methodology shows potential for successfully refining estimates ofGF at large scales and identifies the most suitable attributes for deriving appropriate scaling factors.Large-scale active sensor estimates of GF can establish a baseline from which future monitoringinvestigations can be initiated via upcoming Earth Observation missions. |
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Keywords: |
vegetation; remote sensing; forestry; LiDAR |
College: |
Faculty of Science and Engineering |
Issue: |
1 |
Start Page: |
59 |