Remote sensing of aboveground forest biomass : A review

Forests are central to global carbon cycle, therefore, accurate inventorying and monitoring of forest aboveground biomass in local to regional scales is critical in understanding their role as atmospheric carbon sinks or sources. This article provides a review of various remote sensing applications in forest aboveground biomass inventorying and monitoring as well as highlights the associated challenges and opportunities. The review concluded that the use of remote sensing in large-scale forest aboveground biomass quantification provides plausible alternatives, when compared to the use of conventional approaches, which are labour-, cost-, and time-intensive and sometimes inapplicable due to poor accessibility. It was noted that although remote sensing provides reasonably accurate forest aboveground biomass estimates, active sensors, such as LiDAR and radar are not fully operational as yet due to complex preprocessing and high cost of data acquisition.

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