Monitoring changes in tropical forests using L-band synthetic aperture radar data

In the paper, we present the performance analyses of the L-band SAR data (PALSAR and Pi-SAR-L2) for tropical deforestation and degradation monitoring in Riau province, Indonesia. For deforestation monitoring, accuracy assessment and demonstration of wide area mapping using the time series PALSAR gamma naught mosaics were shown. We used a simple thresholding for the temporal gamma naught changes in HV polarization, which allowed us to map annual deforestation full-automatically with over 90% accuracy and 100 m resolution. For degradation, we found that texture information in backscatter intensity images has a potential for wall-to-wall mapping the changes of canopy structure due to fallen trees.