Speaker
Dr
Jörg Haarpaintner
(Norut - Northern Research Institute)
Description
The overall goal of the ESA funded DUE Innovator III project “SAR for REDD” is to provide satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) pre-processing and analyzing capabilities and tools for operational tropical forest monitoring to REDD countries and primarily in Africa.
The UN initiative Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, including conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+), is an effort to create a financial value for the carbon stored in forests, offering incentives for developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands and invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. A necessity to implement REDD+ is the development of consistent and accurate monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems based on both remote sensing and in-situ measurements.
As persistent cloud cover in the humid tropics prevent reliable observations at any time with optical satellite sensors, cloud-penetrating SAR imagery has proven to be a useful tool for interoperability and/or to complement optical satellite forest monitoring systems. For forest applications, L-band SAR is generally better suited than C- or X-band since its signal penetrates deeper into the forest canopy and thus, also provides more information on biomass. However, with the launch of Sentinel-1A in 2014, ESA’s C-band SAR has evolved from a research purpose to a fully operational satellite with higher coverage and revisit frequencies to establish denser time-series, increased radiometric accuracy and free data policy.
SAR pre-processing and analysis has not been at the reach for everybody and there is still a strong need for technical and human capacity in developing countries for this sensor type to be fully used. Since the 1990, Norut has developed automatic SAR pre-processing and analysis tools and set up operational SAR-based monitoring system for several environmental monitoring projects.
In this project, Norut will therefore not only provide already processed remote sensing products in the form of radiometric calibrated and geo-referenced SAR images and mosaics, forest/non-forest maps and forest change maps for specific periods, but also provide necessary easy-to-use tools for SAR pre-processing, mosaicking, temporal averaging and classification. The system will be able to process the main historical and current SAR sensors: ERS-1&2 SAR, Envisat ASAR, ALOS Palsar (1&2), Radarsat-2 and Sentinel-1. This will give REDD countries the possibility to process and analyze historical and future SAR imagery and implement SAR into their operational forest monitoring systems to improve their monitoring, reporting and verification of REDD activities.
The pilot focus region is the Mai-Ndombe district in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the service user is the Observatoir Satellitale des Forêts d’Afrique Centrale (OSFAC), a Congolese NGO, who support the management of natural resources with satellite based products and advises governmental institutions of several Congo Basin countries. OSFAC has been a close collaborator and already a user in the EU FP7 project ReCover where Norut has developped SAR based forest products based on Envisat ASAR and ALOS PALSAR.
Primary author
Dr
Jörg Haarpaintner
(Norut - Northern Research Institute)
