Mapping palm oil expansion using SAR to study the impact on the CO2 cycle

With Malaysia being the second largest palm oil producer in the world and the fact that palm oil ranks first in vegetable oil production on the world market the palm oil industry became an important factor in the country. Along with the expansion of palm oil across the nation causing deforestation of natural rain forest and conversion of peat land into plantation land there are several factors causing a tremendous increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Main causes of CO2 emission apart from deforestation and peat-land conversion are the fires to create plantation land plus the fires burning waste products of the plantations itself. This paper describes a project that aims at the development of a remote sensing monitoring system to allow a continuous observation of oil palm plantation activities and expansion in order to be able to quantify CO2 emissions. The research concentrates on developing a spaceborne synthetic aperture radar information extraction system for palm oil plantations in the Tropics. This will lead to objective figures that can be used internationally to create a policy implementation plan to sustainably reduce CO2 emission in the future.

[1]  D. H. Hoekman,et al.  Radar monitoring system for sustainable forest management in Indonesia , 1997, IGARSS'97. 1997 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Proceedings. Remote Sensing - A Scientific Vision for Sustainable Development.

[2]  Tomohiro Shiraishi,et al.  Generation of 10m resolution PALSAR and JERS-SAR mosaic and forest/non-forest maps for forest carbon tracking , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[3]  F. Sulaiman,et al.  An outlook of Malaysian energy, oil palm industry and its utilization of wastes as useful resources , 2011 .

[4]  Yasser Maghsoudi,et al.  Radarsat-2 Polarimetric SAR Data for Boreal Forest Classification Using SVM and a Wrapper Feature Selector , 2013, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

[5]  G. Asner,et al.  Spatial and temporal probabilities of obtaining cloud‐free Landsat images over the Brazilian tropical savanna , 2007 .

[6]  S. Solberg,et al.  Monitoring spruce volume and biomass with InSAR data from TanDEM-X , 2013 .

[7]  Dirk H. Hoekman,et al.  PALSAR Wide-Area Mapping of Borneo: Methodology and Map Validation , 2010, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

[8]  Jean-Paul Rudant,et al.  Contribution of TerraSAR-X radar images texture for forest monitoring , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[9]  Karsten Schulz,et al.  Structural analysis of forest areas in high-resolution SAR images , 2011, Remote Sensing.

[10]  Subhash Bhatia,et al.  Palm oil: Addressing issues and towards sustainable development , 2009 .

[11]  Massimo Barbieri,et al.  Synergetic use of multi-temporal ALOS PALSAR and ENVISAT ASAR data for topographic/land cover mapping and monitoring at national scale in Africa , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[12]  Bangqian Chen,et al.  Mapping deciduous rubber plantations through integration of PALSAR and multi-temporal Landsat imagery , 2013 .

[13]  Guoqing Sun,et al.  Analysis of the effect of crown structure changes on backscattering coefficient using modeling and SAR data , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[14]  Mark L. Williams,et al.  Interoperability of multi-frequency SAR data for forest information extraction in support of national MRV systems , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[15]  Md. Latifur Rahman Sarker,et al.  Forest biomass estimation from the fusion of C-band SAR and optical data using wavelet transform , 2013, Remote Sensing.

[16]  Sassan Saatchi,et al.  A novel application of satellite radar data: measuring carbon sequestration and detecting degradation in a community forestry project in Mozambique , 2013 .

[17]  Xin Wang,et al.  Pasture Monitoring Using SAR with COSMO-SkyMed, ENVISAT ASAR, and ALOS PALSAR in Otway, Australia , 2013, Remote. Sens..

[18]  Sandra Englhart,et al.  Aboveground biomass retrieval in tropical forests — The potential of combined X- and L-band SAR data use , 2011 .

[20]  Masanobu Shimada.  Coherence dependency of the PALSAR POLinSAR on forest in japan and amazon , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[21]  R. Leiterer,et al.  Forest change mapping in Northeast China using SAR and INSAR data , 2011 .

[22]  Stefan Hinz,et al.  Automated detection of storm damage in forest areas by analyzing TerraSAR-X data , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[23]  C. Patnaik,et al.  Discrimination of mangrove forests and characterization of adjoining land cover classes using temporal C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar data: A case study of Sundarbans , 2013, Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs. Geoinformation.

[24]  Y. Yamagata,et al.  The use of ALOS/PALSAR backscatter to estimate above-ground forest biomass: A case study in Western Siberia , 2013 .

[25]  Joseph P. Messina,et al.  Multi-Sensor Data Fusion for Modeling African Palm in the Ecuadorian Amazon , 2008 .

[26]  Janet E. Nichol,et al.  Forest Biomass Estimation Using Texture Measurements of High-Resolution Dual-Polarization C-Band SAR Data , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[27]  Biswajeet Pradhan,et al.  Estimation of above ground biomass of oil palm trees by PALSAR , 2012, 2012 IEEE Colloquium on Humanities, Science and Engineering (CHUSER).

[28]  T. Baldauf.  Monitoring Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) : Capabilities of High- Resolution Active Remote Sensing , 2013 .

[29]  I. Hajnsek,et al.  Applying polarimetric SAR interferometric data for forest classification , 2005, Proceedings. 2005 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2005. IGARSS '05..

[30]  F. Amar,et al.  Biomass and structure estimation of primary and secondary tropical rain forests using AirSAR data , 1995, 1995 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS '95. Quantitative Remote Sensing for Science and Applications.

[31]  Chunhua Zhang,et al.  Assessing relationships between Radarsat-2 C-band and structural parameters of a degraded mangrove forest , 2013 .

[32]  Manabu Watanabe,et al.  The tropical forest in south east Asia: Monitoring and scenario modeling using synthetic aperture radar data , 2013 .

[33]  D. Burslem,et al.  Estimating aboveground biomass in forest and oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo using ALOS PALSAR data , 2011 .

[34]  Yngvar Larsen,et al.  Forest monitoring in Congo Basin with combined use of SAR C- & L-band , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[35]  W. Salas,et al.  Baseline Map of Carbon Emissions from Deforestation in Tropical Regions , 2012, Science.

[36]  Christiane Schmullius,et al.  Estimates of Forest Growing Stock Volume for Sweden, Central Siberia, and Québec Using Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar Backscatter Data , 2013, Remote. Sens..

[37]  Barbara Koch,et al.  Status and future of laser scanning, synthetic aperture radar and hyperspectral remote sensing data for forest biomass assessment , 2010 .

[38]  André Twele,et al.  Regional land cover mapping in the humid tropics using combined optical and SAR satellite data—a case study from Central Sulawesi, Indonesia , 2009 .