Evaluation of different methods for forest regional biomass mapping from UAVSAR data

Forest plays a vital role in carbon, energy and water cycling of Earth System. Estimation of forest biomass has become essential to ecosystem studies. In this paper, three approaches, linear regression, Maximum Entropy and Look-up table based on model, were adopted. It was found that linear regression or Maximum Entropy met the saturation when biomass reached 170 Mg/ha, by use of either HV polarization or all polarizations. Look-up Table based on backscatter model could predict biomass well with the highest R²=0.74, and over 250Mg/ha without saturation problem.