Estimating Forest Canopy Height based on GEDI Lidar Data and Multi-source Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Estimating forest canopy height is crucial for assessing aboveground biomass and carbon sequestration. Light detection and ranging (lidar) is an important technology for its ability in capturing vertical structural information. However, due to instrument limitations and cost constraints, acquiring large-scale and continuous forest data solely through lidar is challenging. To compensate this, remote sensing images can be used to cover wide regions. Therefore, leveraging multi-source data for constructing canopy height models (CHMs) holds great promise in this field. The objective of this study is to evaluate and compare the contributions of multi-source remote sensing data and methods in estimating forest canopy height. In constructing the CHM, the commonly used random forest (RF) and fully convolutional network (FCN) are assessed. The canopy height obtained from GEDI was used as the reference data, and Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 data were used for prediction. Multiple CHMs were constructed for the Dabie Mountains, Central China, in 2019 based on different data sources and methods, respectively, which are then comparatively analysed. The results showed that (1) the accuracy of the CHM using Sentinel-2 as input is marginally better than that using Landsat 8 based on RF, where the difference is insignificant; and (2) FCN is less accurate than RF despite domain-specific fine-tuning, although further improvement in accuracy is expected by weighing in more FCN models.