Forest structure and biomass in a mixed forest-oil palm landscape in Borneo

The research focusses on differentiating between the AGB and forest stand parameters of riparian and non-riparian zones of a mixed land use type in Malaysian Borneo comprising of lowland forests, logged forests and oil palm plantations. Detailed field surveys were carried out to collect forest mensuration data.Field work was complemented by extensive remote sensing analysis. Fourier analysis and grey level co-occurrence based texture analysis techniques were applied on SPOT 5 data for both differentiating and predicting the AGB values for different forest types. It was found Fourier based methods could both differentiate and predict the biomass of different land use types without undergoing saturation. The research establishes thresholds for disturbances these forests zones can undergo before their AGB values decline. The research also determined that AGB value is much higher for riparian margins than for surrounding oil palm plantations. Hence the retention of riparian margins can yield significant carbon storage benefits.