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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Daily Overview

Session

Biomass Campaigns
Location: Purple Hall
Session Chair: Nuno Carvalhais, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
Session Chair: Ludovic Villard, CESBIO / CNRS

Presentation 3

2:50pm - 3:10pm

GEO-TREES: high-accuracy ground data for satellite-derived biomass mapping

Jerome Chave¹, Klaus Scipal², Cheryl Brown³, Stuart Davies³, Alvaro Duque⁴, Ayala Loisel¹, Beatriz Marimon⁵, Oliver L. Phillips⁶, Camille Piponiot-Laroche⁷, Lillian Rodriguez⁸, Irié Zo-Bi⁹

1: CNRS, Toulouse, France; 2: European Space Agency, Italy; 3: Smithsonian Institution, USA; 4: National University of Colombia, Colombia; 5: Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso, Brazil; 6: University of Leeds, UK; 7: CIRAD, France; 8: University of the Philippines, the Philippines; 9: INPHB, Côte d'Ivoire

* Land vegetation is a large carbon store and represents opportunities to sequester additional carbon. While many Earth Observation missions aim to estimate forest biomass from space, their calibration and validation is critical. Ultimately trust in biomass maps requires accurate ground data. Supporting ground measurements and the people who make them is thus mission-critical for mapping and tracking Earth’s forest carbon. Building on decades of work from the global research community with a strong representation of partners from the Global South, the GEO-TREES initiative funds high quality ground data from a global network of reference sites, and to make these data openly accessible.

* In this contribution, we report on the progress in community building, data acquisition, processing and delivery at over 40 biomass reference measurement sites. For each biomass reference measurement site, data acquired by the consortium partners includes plot inventory measurements at ≥10 hectares of forest, aerial laser scanning (ALS) coverage over ≥1000 ha of forests, and terrestrial laser scanning of the forest for ≥3 hectares.

* We intend to provide the following data: (1) a 0.25-ha resolution aboveground biomass density (AGBD, Mg/ha) estimate for each tree inventory subplot, together with a variance estimate; (2) a 0.25-ha resolution canopy height (m) estimate for each tree inventory subplot, together with a variance estimate; (3) a 0.25-ha map of AGBD inferred from ALS and plot data, together with a pixelwise variance estimate; (4) a 0.25-ha map of canopy height inferred from ALS, together with a pixel-wise variance estimate; (5) a 0.25-ha resolution aboveground biomass density (AGBD, Mg/ha) estimate for subplot scanned with TLS, together with a variance estimate; (6) ancillary data for each site. We detail how plot-level and ALS data is processed to account for uncertainty and possible bias, based on open-access pipelines that are both reproducible and that can be used by the broader GEO-TREES community, using the ESA MAAP. When ready, the data will be accessible on the GEO-TREES data portal.

* We emphasize the importance of involving research scientists associated with the sites in product validation plans. Not only do they provide essential high-quality data, they also offer invaluable insights about the peculiarities of the study sites which a mission validation plan would ignore at its peril. The establishment of GEO-TREES, a coordinated network of validation sites, is crucial for the success of biomass missions. In the future, it could also prove useful for the validation of other Earth observation missions aimed at quantifying forest-related geophysical measurements.