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Preparing to monitor coniferous forests with Sentinel-2 mission (Forwarded)



 
 
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Old February 18th 07, 03:25 PM posted to sci.space.news
Andrew Yee[_1_]
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Default Preparing to monitor coniferous forests with Sentinel-2 mission (Forwarded)

ESA News
http://www.esa.int

9 February 2007

Preparing to monitor coniferous forests with Sentinel-2

Within the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) framework,
sustainable management of forests is recognised as an important challenge --
one objective that will be addressed with the planned Sentinel-2 mission.

As part of the mission's preparatory activities, scientists have been
conducting experiments in a mountainous region of the Czech Republic to help
design a new procedure for retrieving precise data on the health of spruce
forests.

Since the spring of 2005, scientists working for the Institute of Systems
Biology and Ecology (ISBE) from the Czech Academy of Sciences have been
focusing on research aimed at designing a physically-based algorithm to
scale spectral and spatial data on vegetation, which is relevant to the
development of the Sentinel-2 mission.

As one of a series of operational Earth Observation satellites planned as
the space segment of GMES, Sentinel-2 will be a multispectral optical
imaging mission for terrestrial applications and will provide continuity to
the current Landsat and Spot satellites guaranteeing the availability of
data to service providers and users. Formulating algorithms so that the
eventual retrieved data is of optimum use is an important part of this new
mission's preparatory activities.

The research into this new algorithm is focused on the forests of Norwegian
spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) growing within montane and boreal
ecosystems. Boreal forest is one of the largest types of biomass on Earth,
therefore, research into the dynamics of the carbon cycle within this
ecosystem and forest management are of scientific and economic importance.
It is expected that the research carried out in the Czech Republic will
result in a clearly defined procedure for retrieving chlorophyll content and
Leaf Area Index (LAI) from optical imagery at high spatial resolution, as
will be realised from the Sentinel-2 mission.

This activity also falls within the framework of ESA's Plan for European
Cooperating States (PECS). The aim of PECS is to stimulate relations with
interested European parties to increase the synergy between ESA programmes
and the future plans in the space field for four East European countries --
Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Poland. Joining in 2004, the Czech
Republic was the second country to sign the European Cooperating State
Charter with ESA. Hungary also signed the Charter in 2004 and Romania signed
the first European Cooperating State Agreement in 2006.

As part of the process to define these new algorithms, a complex campaign
named HYPERspectral ThREE Scalse (HYPERTREES) was carried out in August and
September 2006. Data from three levels -- ground, airborne and satellite
level -- were simultaneously collected at an experimental research site
called Bily Kris (White Cross), located in the Moravian-Silesian Beskydy
mountains in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. The test site is
equipped with a sophisticated ground system for monitoring basic Norwegian
spruce ecosystems, and includes the facilities to measure carbon dioxide
fluxes with an Eddy-covariance flux tower. Three structurally different
plots of the spruce were studied within the test site -- one which
represented a relatively young (29 year old) homogenous monoculture growing
in regular patterns, and two other plots with mature forest dominated by
adult spruce trees (between 75 and 110 years old) growing irregularly.

The ground-level part of the campaign involved the collection of data
required to parameterize the radiative transfer models, as well as data
needed to assess the quality of the final remote-sensing map products. When
parameterizing high spatial resolution radiative transfer through spruce
forest, careful attention has to be paid to the optical and geometric
inputs. To this end, the optical properties of the spruce needles were
measured in the field, taking their age and growing irradiation conditions
into consideration. The same needle sets were used to determine their
chlorophyll content in the laboratory in order to validate the later
remotely-sensed chlorophyll estimations. With respect to the geometrical
parameters, the spatial distribution of the trees within the plots, the
shape of their crowns, their height and other characteristics were mapped.
Finally, the LAI for all three plots measured.

The airborne part of the campaign involved acquiring hyperspectral images
with a Very Near Infrared Radiometer (VNIR) system AISA Eagle operated from
a photogrammetric Cessna TU 206 F aircraft. A total of 28 flights were taken
at three altitudes to achieve three different spatial resolutions. The
spaceborne part of the campaign was accomplished by the Compact High
Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS) carried on the Project for On-Board
Autonomy (PROBA) satellite. Three acquisitions were realised over the
research site where each acquisition comprised five multi-angular
hyperspectral scenes. These scenes will be crucial for testing the
newly-developed algorithms.

All the acquired data sets are currently being processed by researchers from
ISBE in cooperation with scientists from Charles University, Prague, Czech
Republic. After the appropriate pre-processing, the data will be used
develop the up-scaling methods that allow the quantitative estimation of the
total chlorophyll content and LAI of Norwegian spruce forests using optical
satellite images of high spatial resolution such as CHRIS/PROBA and
Sentinel-2.

[NOTE: Images and weblinks supporting this release are available at
http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMOSVN2UXE_planet_1.html ]
 




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