Review of the use of remote sensing for biomass estimation to support renewable energy generation

Abstract

The quantification, mapping and monitoring of biomass are now central issues due to the importance of biomass as a renewable energy source in many countries of the world. The estimation of biomass is a challenging task, especially in areas with complex stands and varying environmental conditions, and requires accurate and consistent measurement methods. To efficiently and effectively use biomass as a renewable energy source, it is important to have detailed knowledge of its distribution, abundance, and quality. Remote sensing offers the technology to enable rapid assessment of biomass over large areas relatively quickly and at a low cost. This paper provides a comprehensive review of biomass assessment techniques using remote sensing in different environments and using different sensing techniques. It covers forests, savannah, and grasslands/rangelands, and for each of these environments, reviews key work that has been undertaken and compares the techniques that have been the most successful. © The Authors.Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.

Examining Spectral Reflectance Saturation in Landsat Imagery and Corresponding Solutions to Improve Forest Aboveground Biomass Estimation

“…In contrast, remote sensing-based approaches have become popular due to their unique characteristics in data collection and presentation; that is, multitemporal remote sensing images not only reveal spatial variability, spatial distributions, and patterns of forests but also provide the potential to estimate their changes over time [4][5][6][7]. A large number of research papers on biomass estimation using remote sensing data have been published in the past three decades, as summarized in previous literature review papers (e.g., [4,6,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17]). …”

“…Various remotely sensed images from optical sensors and radar and lidar systems have been utilized to estimate and map forest biomass/carbon by combining with ground sample plot data [5,6,[11][12][13][14][15]. The optical imagery-based technologies are commonly used for biomass estimation due to high correlations between spectral bands and biomass [4,6,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28].…”

Remote Sensing of Above-Ground Biomass

“…Data from Remote Sensing satellites are available at various scales, from local to global, and from a number of different platforms. There are also different types of data, such as optical, radar and LiDAR, with each one having certain advantages over the others [15].…”

“…The spatial resolutions vary from less than one metre to hundreds of metres. Optical Remote Sensing data has been used by numerous researchers for biomass estimation [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27].Radar Remote Sensing has gained prominence for above-ground biomass estimation in recent years due to its cloud penetration ability as well as detailed vegetation structural information [15]. While airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems have been operating for many years, space-borne systems such as Terra-SAR, ALOS and PALSAR have become available since 2000.…”

“…Data from Remote Sensing satellites are available at various scales, from local to global, and from a number of different platforms. There are also different types of data, such as optical, radar and LiDAR, with each one having certain advantages over the others [15].Optical Remote Sensing probably provides the best alternative to biomass estimation through field sampling due to its global coverage, repetitiveness and cost-effectiveness. Optical Remote Sensing data is available from a number of platforms, such as IKONOS, Quickbird, Worldview, SPOT, Sentinel, Landsat and MODIS.…”