Land cover and forest mapping supports decision makers in the course of making informed decisions for implementation of sustainable conservation and management plans of the forest resources and environmental monitoring. This research examines the value of integrating of ALOS PALSAR and Landsat data for improved forest and land cover mapping in Northern Tanzania. A separate and joint processing ...

Accurately mapping the spatial distribution of forests in sub-humid to semi-arid regions over time is important for forest management but a challenging task. Relatively large uncertainties still exist in the spatial distribution of forests and forest changes in the sub-humid and semi-arid regions. Numerous publications have used either optical or synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing im...

Currently there are about 5.89 million ha of forest occur in Peninsular Malaysia, which covers about 44.7% of its land area. Out of this, 4.92 million ha falls under Permanent Reserved Forest (PRF), 0.58 million ha is Totally Protected Area (TPA) and the remaining 0.39 million ha belongs to state/alienated land. These figures are officially used by the Forestry Department Peninsular Malaysia (F...

In contrast to earlier satellites with SAR instruments, the ENVISAT and ALOS platforms provide state vectors and timing with higher relative and absolute accuracy, allowing the ASAR and PALSAR sensors to directly support accurate tiepoint-free geolocation of their imagery. This enables not only direct map overlays with other sources, but also normalisation for the systematic influence of terrai...

The Global Digital Elevation Model produced from stereo images of Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer data (ASTER GDEM) covers land surfaces between latitudes of 83°N and 83°S. The Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) onboard Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) collected many SAR images since it was launched on 24 January 2006. The combinati...

This paper presents a verification processor, developed under ESA contract, for the generation of polarimetric, interferometric and polarimetric-interferometric geocoded products derived from SAR data obtained from the ALOS PALSAR instrument. The processor, developed with a modular approach, contains the following main elements: Phase-preserving fine resolution processor; Phase-preserving ScanS...

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been an unparalleled tool in cloudy and rainy regions as it allows observations throughout the year because of its all-weather, all-day operation capability. In this paper, the influence of Wenchuan Earthquake on the Sichuan Giant Panda habitats was evaluated for the first time using SAR interferometry and combining data from C-band Envisat ASAR and L-band ALO...

The joint processing of remote sensing data acquired from sensors operating at different wavelengths has the potential to significantly improve the operation of global forest mapping and monitoring systems. This paper presents an analysis of the forest discrimination properties of Landsat TM and ALOS-PALSAR data when considered as a combined source of information. This study is carried out over...