British National Space Centre

Abstract. Databases of spaceborne SAR imagery from three different types of forest have been compiled for the study of the relationship between SAR backscatter and biomass density. Imagery of temperate forest at Thetford in the UK, boreal forest at Siggefora in Sweden and tropical forest at Tapajós in Brazil have been acquired from SAR instruments on the ERS-1, JERS-1 and SIR-C spaceborne platforms. These data have been combined with biomass density ground data collected on various field campaigns to compare the dependence of backscatter on forest biomass density between the three different forest types. The analysis is complete for the temperate and tropical test sites and will be achieved soon for the boreal test site. preliminary results indicate that L-band HV imagery is most sensitive to forest biomass and that biomass dependencies are comparable for all types of forest. It is estimated that the maximum biomass that could be retrieved using L-band SAR data is approximately 63 tonnes/hectare which would make it suitable for monitoring regenerating tropical forest, young temperate forest or medium-aged boreal forest