Forest Disturbance Mapping with Microwave Remote Sensing

Abstract It is pre-requisite to conserve and protect the forest cover, therefore mapping of the forest distribution and monitoring of their temporal changes are also necessary. In the field of forestry, radar datasets have a high potential due to its ability to derive/extract information from the surface, sub-surface and even from the depth. The current work tries to utilize the capability of C-band radar datasets provided by Sentinel 1A/B mission to derive the required information for sensing the disturbances in the forest areas. Application of SAR or microwave remote sensing for forest disturbance mapping with dual-polarization is partially developed and have been attempted by limited researchers to process and interpret the derived results. Microwave datasets can map the areas with frequent cloud-cover due to its cloud penetrating capabilities in day-night operation mode. The present work tries to identify and locate the disturbances in forest areas to organize better understanding of detailed information for further analysis with the help of open archive microwave datasets incoherent to optical datasets.