Creation of Large Area Forest Biomass Maps for Northeast China Using Ers-1/2 Tandem Coherence

One of the objectives of the Forest DRAGON project is the generation of a forest biomass map for Northeast China based on ERS-1/2 tandem coherence. The ERS1/2 tandem dataset consisted of 223 image pairs acquired in all seasons between 1995 and 1998. ERS1/2 tandem coherence has been shown to provide accurate estimates of forest biomass but is also known to depend strongly on the meteorological and environmental conditions at image acquisition. For large-area mapping existing algorithms have not been able so far to classify forest biomass based on a multiseasonal dataset. In this study a new classification approach, based on synergy between the optical remote sensing product MODIS Vegetation Continuous Field and ERS-1/2 tandem coherence, has been developed for automatic and seasonal-adaptive retrieval of forest biomass. The procedure integrates the semi-empirical Interferometric Water Cloud Model. With this procedure a forest biomass map of Northeast China (~ 1.5 Million km 2 ) discriminating between four stem volume classes (0-20, 20-50, 50-80 and > 80 m 3 /ha) has