Global Forest/Non-Forest coverage and the change between 2007 and 2015 using the PALSAR and PALSAR-2

Abstract:

Advanced Land Observation Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) has been in low polar orbit of 628km height with 14-day revisit time since May 24, 2014, carrying the L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR-2). Out of the ALOS-2's four mission objectives, the forest observation program of the JAXA's crucial science program monitors globally the natural forest coverage and its temporal variation, which is being decreased due to the increased human activity since the last century. Use of the L-band SAR for the forest monitoring is more advantageous than the other method because of its all weather observation capability at the cloudy and the rainy area in the pan tropical regions. Using all the archives of PALSAR (2007-2010), JAXA has created the L-band SAR based forest/non-forest dataset and opened to the public (2014), as that the global forest area has the 38,000,000km2 agreeing with the Forest Resource Assessment (FRA) at less than 5% discrepancy. ALOS was terminated on April 22 2011 after the five years mission operation. In year 2014, the forest monitoring activity using the PALSAR-2 has been resumed and achieved the 79% of the global land observation using the PALSAR-2. In 2015, the remaining 21 % would be observed from summer season (starting from June). Use of 2014-2015 all PALSAR-2 archives will be compiled to clarify the decadal forest cover change of 2007-2014/15. In this presentation, the updated forest coverage using the PALSAR-2 will be introduced.