Continuous Nationwide Forest Aboveground Biomass Mapping in Mexico: Integrating GEDI and Landsat Time Series Data
Taejin Park, NASA Ames Research Center / BAERI, tpark@baeri.org (Presenter)
Rodrigo Vargas, University of Delaware, rvargas@udel.edu
Ramakrishna R. Nemani, NASA Ames Research Center / BAERI, rama.nemani@nasa.gov
Ian G. Brosnan, NASA Ames Research Center, ian.g.brosnan@nasa.gov
Mexico holds significant promise for the UN's Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program, a vital nature-based solution for forest management. To effectively monitor carbon stock changes, there's an increasing need for unbiased and continuous Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) systems that support robust forest management and climate change mitigation strategies. Currently national assessments of aboveground biomass density (AGBD) in Mexico based on remote sensing are sparse and often limited to static, one-time maps, resulting in inconsistencies over space and time. Furthermore, Mexico has experienced budgetary constraints on the repetitive national forest inventory. In response to these challenges, our work within NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) program has developed a remote sensing-based methodology to generate consistent historical AGBD maps for Mexico. This approach integrates multi-source remote sensing data, including spaceborne lidar (Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation or GEDI), long-term Landsat time series, and topographic information. We use the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm for temporal modeling of Landsat surface reflectance. This CCDC-derived temporal surface reflectance data captures land surface dynamics and is ultimately used as input for a random forest machine learning algorithm to estimate forest AGBD. GEDI data offers unprecedented large-scale forest structure and AGBD sampling for training and validating our models. In this presentation, we will detail our progress in developing spatially explicit maps that capture historical changes in AGBD, accounting for land surface changes and post-disturbance landscapes.
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 9
Presentation Type: Poster
Theme: Land Biomass