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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

PolInSAR Campaigns
Location: Red Hall
Session Chair: Jean-Francois Nouvel, ONERA
Session Chair: Marc Simard, Jet propulsion Laboratory

Presentation 4

10:00am - 10:20am

Mapping Tropical Forest in Gabon with L-/P-band Multibaseline Acquisitions: Results from the GABONX Campaigns

Irena Hajnsek^1,2, Matteo Pardini¹, Roman Guliaev¹, Kostas Papathanassiou¹, Fred Terrance Ndouni Missono^1,3, Martin Keller¹, Marc Jaeger¹, Tania Casal⁴

1: DLR, Microwaves and Radar Institute, Germany; 2: ETH Zurich, Institute of Environmental Engineering, Switzerland; 3: AGEOS Agence Spatial de Gabon, Gabon; 4: ESA-ESTEC – Earth Observation Campaigns Section – Noordwijk (Netherlands)

Tropical forests are particularly important. Although they only cover about 6% of Earth’s surface, they are home to approx. 50% of the world’s animal and plant species. Their trees store 50% more carbon than trees outside the tropics. At the same time, they are one of the most endangered ecosystems on Earth: about 6 million of hectares per year are felled for timber or cleared for farming. Compared to the other components of the carbon cycle (i.e. the ocean as a sink and the burning of fossil fuels as a source), the uncertainty in the land local carbon stocks and the carbon fluxes are particularly large. This is especially true for tropical forests, which remain poorly characterized compared to other ecosystems on the planet. More than 98% of the land use change flux should be due to tropical deforestation, which converts carbon stored as woody biomass (of which around 50% is biomass) into emissions.

In the frame of the ESAs BIOMASS mission, selected in May 2013 as the 7th Earth Explorer mission to meet the pressing need for information on tropical carbon sinks and sources through estimates of forest height and biomass a first airborne campaign over tropical forest in Gabon was conducted. The campaign, called AFRISAR took place over four forest sites in Gabon where two acquisitions at different season where made, the first one was conducted by ONERA (SETHI system, July 2015) and the second one by DLR (F-SAR system, February 2016).

After 7 years a second campaign, called AFRISAR-2/GABONX, was conducted in 2023 exactly over the same test site and three further one selected by the Gabonese partners (the space agency AGEOS, CENAREST and the Ministry of Forest) with the same configuration. This time the campaign served also the mission objectives of ROSE-L, with its six days repeat-pass cycles acquiring fully polarimetric and multi-baseline data sets in L- and P-band. The main objective of this campaign was to observe short term changes in terms of decorrelation on the interferometric coherence and long term changes over 7 years.

A third campaign was conducted in late 2025 underflying the BIOMASS satellite in P-band for signal calibration and validation. First results of the campaign will be presented and a change analysis will be provided for the 7 and 9 years difference.