H. H. Shugart

Forest disturbance and recovery: A general review in the context of spaceborne remote sensing of impacts on aboveground biomass and canopy structure

[1] Abrupt forest disturbances generating gaps >0.001 km 2 impact roughly 0.4–0.7 million km 2 a 1 . Fire, windstorms, logging, and shifting cultivation are dominant disturbances; minor contributors are land conversion, flooding, landslides, and avalanches. All can have substantial impacts on canopy biomass and structure. Quantifying disturbance location, extent, severity, and the fate of disturbed biomass will improve carbon budget estimates and lead to better initialization, parameterization, and/or testing of forest carbon cycle models. Spaceborne remote sensing maps large-scale forest disturbance occurrence, location, and extent, particularly with moderate- and fine-scale resolution passive optical/near-infrared (NIR) instruments. High-resolution remote sensing (e.g., 1 m passive optical/NIR, or small footprint lidar) can map crown geometry and gaps, but has rarely been systematically applied to study small-scale disturbance and natural mortality gap dynamics over large regions. Reducing uncertainty in disturbance and recovery impacts on global forest carbon balance requires quantification of (1) predisturbance forest biomass; (2) disturbance impact on standing biomass and its fate; and (3) rate of biomass accumulation during recovery. Active remote sensing data (e.g., lidar, radar) are more directly indicative of canopy biomass and many structural properties than passive instrument data; a new generation of instruments designed to generate global coverage/sampling of canopy biomass and structure can improve our ability to quantify the carbon balance of Earth’s forests. Generating a high-quality quantitative assessment of disturbance impacts on canopy biomass and structure with spaceborne remote sensing requires comprehensive, well designed, and well coordinated field programs collecting high-quality ground-based data and linkages to dynamical models that can use this information.

The BIOMASS mission — An ESA Earth Explorer candidate to measure the BIOMASS of the earth's forests

The European Space Agency (ESA) released a Call for Proposals for the next Earth Explorer Core Mission in March 2005, with the aim to select the 7th Earth Explorer (EE-7) mission for launch in the next decade. Twenty-four proposals were received and subject to scientific and technical assessment. Six candidate missions were selected and further investigated in the preliminary feasibility studies (Phase 0). One of these missions is BIOMASS, which has recently been selected to proceed to Phase-A. BIOMASS is a response to the urgent need for greatly improved mapping of global biomass and the lack of any current space systems capable of addressing this need.

Regional fuel load for two climatically contrasting years in southern Africa

[1] Available fuel loads for burning in savanna ecosystems in the southern African region have been estimated using a new Fuel load-Net Primary Production model based on ecophysiological processes such as respiration and Potential Evapotranspiration. The model outputs 15-day standing available fuel load layers for an entire year (a total of 24 layers). Published data from the Southern African Fire-Atmosphere Research Initiative (SAFARI-92) project and from the Southern African Regional Science Initiative (SAFARI 2000) field campaigns were generally in agreement with the estimations. Consistently with previous studies, precipitation was recognized to be the major climatic driver for fuel production. As a consequence, even though there was a regional increase in precipitation in 1999–2000 as compared to the 1991–1992 periods, the temporal and spatial variability in precipitation at fine scales (site level) was important enough to restrict generalities over the entire region for fuel load production. Four areas of interest, Etosha National Park (Namibia), Mongu (Zambia), Kasama (Zambia), and Kruger National Park (South Africa), were selected to reconstruct an aridity gradient and analyze their fuel load variability over the two years. These areas presented contrasting fuel load distributions for the two very different studied periods with arid areas producing heavier fuel loads in 1999–2000, and the more humid areas producing heavier fuel loads in 1991–1992. The consequences of such fuel load variability and the use of such results are discussed. INDEX TERMS: 0315 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Biosphere/atmosphere interactions; 1615 Global Change: Biogeochemical processes (4805); 1640 Global Change: Remote sensing; 3354 Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics: Precipitation (1854); 9305 Information Related to Geographic Region: Africa; KEYWORDS: climate, precipitation, net primary production, Fire, NOVI, tree cover

Using MODIS to evaluate heterogeneity of biomass burning in southern African savannahs: a case study in Etosha

As part of SAFARI 2000, this study investigated fire severity associated with, and emissions released from, a wildfire that burned a total area of approximately 3200 km2 of semi‐arid savannahs in the region of Etosha National Park, Namibia. Percent tree cover derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data was used to scale up from site‐level field measurements to landscape‐level emission fields. Empirical relationships relating fuel load and combustion completeness to tree cover were developed from field observations. These relationships were coupled to the remotely sensed data to determine the emissions released over the entire area burned. Emissions from this single fire event were estimated to be 1.4×1012 g of CO2, 52.4×109 g of CO, 1.5×109 g of CH4, 1.85×109 g of non‐methane hydrocarbons (NMHC), and 2.4×109 g of particles less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5). A Normalized Burned Index difference (NBI diff), representative of fire severity and modified for MODIS data was used to assess the heterogeneity of the burned areas, but no significant correlation was found between this NBI diff and combustion completeness (CC).

The science and measurement concepts underlying the BIOMASS mission

The BIOMASS mission is designed to provide unique information on the biomass in the worlds forests at spatial and temporal resolutions suitable for characterizing their dynamics and their contribution to carbon cycle estimates. To achieve this it combines biomass estimates from direct inversion of polarimetric backscattering coefficients with Pol-InSAR forest height estimates. The mission will also support important secondary objectives, including sub-surface imaging in arid zones, production of a bare-earth DTM and ice applications, and is optimized to be robust against environmental and ionospheric disturbances.

BOREAS TE-22 Allometric Forest Survey Data

The Boreal Ecosystem-Atmospheric Study (BOREAS) TE-22 (Terrestrial Ecology) team collected data sets in support of its efforts to characterize and interpret information on the forest structure of boreal vegetation in the Southern and Northern Study Areas (SSA and NSA) during the 1994 growing season. The data are stored in tabular ASCII files. The data files are available on a CD-ROM (see document number 20010000884), or from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC).