Mapping 30m Boreal Forest Heights Using Landsat and Sentinel Data
Calibrated by ICESat-2
Abstract
Boreal forest heights are closely associated with the global carbon and
energy budget. Existing investigations of boreal forests were mainly
carried out at plot scales, which cannot be guaranteed on an annual and
regional-scale basis given their sampling schemes. The launch of the
Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) onboard the NASA’s
Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) enables the
measurement of forest vertical structure at a global scale. However,
with a photon-counting system, ICESat-2 receives substantially reduced
signals over vegetated regions (low albedo), making its applications in
forest height mapping challenging. This study made the first attempt to
develop a 30-m canopy height model (CHM) for a mountainous forested site
(located at the north of Fairbanks, Alaska) by coupling the ICESat-2
observed canopy heights, Hcanopy (response), with Landsat-8 (L8),
Sentinel-1 (S1) and Sentinel-2 (S2) data using a random forest
regressor. Here, Hcanopy corresponds to the 95th percentile (RH95) of
all identified canopy photons within a 100-m segment. Before CHM
development, low-quality ICESat-2 tracks were filtered out by comparing
with the reference airborne lidar considering factors such as slope,
canopy cover, signal-to-noise ratio, and canopy height uncertainty.
Results suggest that: 1) ICESat-2 Hcanopy has the highest correlation
with airborne lidar RH95 under strong beams; 2) the errors of ICESat-2
tracks become larger under lower signal-to-noise ratios (<5),
steeper terrain (slope >20˚), greater canopy height
uncertainty (>0.3) and sparser canopy cover condition
(<20%); 3) by adopting the aforementioned criteria in
filtering the ICESat-2 tracks, the Pearson’s correlation coefficient (R)
between ICESat-2 Hcanopy and airborne lidar RH95 has been significantly
improved to >0.8 under any beam strength; 4) based on
previous results, we find that incorporating features derived from L8,
S1 and S2 produces the most desirable CHM (R=0.85), and S2 overall shows
a better capability than L8 in predicting regional-scale canopy heights;
5) among all input features, normalized difference vegetation index
(NDVI) calculated based on the first red edge band (703.9nm) of S2 is
the leading feature on CHM development, whereas land cover appears the
least important.