Assessing the performance of HYPERION in relation to eucalypt biochemistry: preliminary project design and specifications

Vegetation function and dynamics are key parameters in terrestrial carbon cycle models. The strong linkages between foliar nitrogen, photosynthetic capacity and ecosystem productivity makes the development of methods to characterize spatial patterns of canopy bio-chemistry a potentially powerful approach for estimating forest carbon fluxes at a variety of scales. The challenge is to extrapolate results from individual leaves to regional scales to estimate carbon cycles across the landscape using combinations of inverse modeling and remote sensing. Hyperspectral remote sensing methods are advancing rapidly and offer the-promise of estimating canopy pigment, bio-chemistry and water content dynamics, which can in turn be linked to carbon assimilation, forest growth and photosynthetic capacity models. This study was undertaken across eucalypt forest near Tumbarumba (Bago-Maragle State Forest), Australia which has a number of eucalypt species, ranging in productivity and age. EO-1 Hyperion imagery has been obtained and a detailed field program undertaken in February 2001. This program involved plot establishment, collected of standard forestry inventory data and the collection of leaf samples. From the sampled eucalypt leaves, individual leaf spectra were recorded, samples dried and a number of foliage bio-physical and bio-chemistry variables analysed. This dataset will form the basis of a comparison with spectral information available from the HYPERION sensor