Document: JAS-3-89-16

Examining landscape scale variability in tropical forest aboveground biomass using lidar.

DRAKE, J.B.* ¹, D.B.CLARK ², R.G.KNOX ³, J.B.BLAIR ³ and R.DUBAYAH ¹

University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA ¹
University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO USA ²
NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771 USA ³

Abstract:
Better estimation of aboveground biomass (AGBM) in terrestrial ecosystems is a critical step toward clarifying the global carbon cycle, and provides insight into how these systems function and partition resources under different environmental conditions. Although AGBM is difficult to estimate over broad spatial scales using many current techniques, large (~25 m) footprint lidar instruments will greatly improve AGBM estimates through measurement of vertical canopy structure. As part of a pre-launch validation plan for the Vegetation Canopy Lidar (VCL) satellite, the Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS), an airborne large-footprint scanning laser altimeter, was flown over the La Selva Biological Station, a 1500 hectare tropical wet forest site located in Costa Rica. In previous work we demonstrated that metrics from LVIS were significantly correlated with ground-based measures of AGBM across the entire successional range at La Selva. In this study we now use this relationship to explore the variability in AGBM over the La Selva landscape. We found that large footprint lidar data could distinguish secondary from primary tropical forest , and could also be used to identify areas of old-growth forest that have been selectively logged (high-graded). In addition, we observed differences in the way aboveground biomass is organized within primary forests on flat areas with alluvial soils and sloped areas on poorer soils. We found that large footprint lidar instruments are highly effective for examining the variability of AGBM over this tropical forest landscape.

Keywords: aboveground biomass, tropical forests, lidar, landscape-level, environmental heterogeneity, La Selva

This abstract is being presented at: 10:30 AM in session:
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