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Monitoring Forest Threats with C- and L-band SAR, Landsat, airborne LiDAR and Ortho-mosaics: A case Study in Sabangau National Park (Central Kalimantan) - Poster
Conference Paper September 2012

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Hans-Dieter Viktor Boehm
Kalteng Consultants
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Monitoring Forest Threats with C- and L-band SAR, Landsat,

airborne LiDAR and Ortho-mosaics:
A case Study in Sabangau National Park (Central Kalimantan)
Veraldo Liesenberg (PhD Student)
TU Bergakademie Freiberg

Viktor Boehm*

*Kalteng Consultants [www.kalteng.org]

Suwido H. Limin
CIMTROP/Uni Palangka Raya

E-mail: viktorboehm@t-online.de
We evaluated the potential of different low cost SAR scenes from the
Advanced Land-Observing Satellite (ALOS) on board the Phased Array Lband Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) and the Advanced SAR (ASAR;
C-band) on board the Environmental Satellite (ENVISAT) for the
monitoring of forest threats (i.e. deforestation and degradation).

Fig. 1. TM/Landsat-5 scene (118/062) acquired

on February 10, 2010. Yellow square indicates the
spatial location of the ALOS/PALSAR scenes.

As a test site we selected the Sabangau National Forest (SNF) located in

Central Kalimantan (Indonesia) (Fig. 1).

First signs of forest threats at Bakung watershed were noticed on summer

2009 with ASAR/ENVISAT (not shown). Landsat was unable to detect early
deforestation stages (up to 150ha in 2010) due to the frequent cloud
coverage and small log/deforestation patterns bringing therefore a late
response in a simulated deforestation system (Fig. 3B). First deforestation
detection was only possible in 2011 (Fig. 3C; with 2 years delay).
Small degradation patches in the forest such as caused by hunting
practices were not detected in either SAR or Landsat scenes due to the
spatial size. However, such forest threats were easily identified using
LiDAR derived Canopy Height Model (CHM). CHM can be obtained with
the subtraction of the Digital Surface Model (DSM) and the Digital
Terrain Model (DTM) and is very useful for the characterization of the
vertical structure of the vegetation and for the identification of small
threats in the forest caused by illegal logging at Bakung watershed (Fig.
4A) and forest log caused by hunting practices in the main CIMTROP
research transect (Fig. 4B).

In the period of April 2007 and April 2011 all available quad-polarization
ALOS/PALSAR (i.e. four scenes) and dual-polarization ASAR (i.e. ten
scenes) were selected for this investigation. The motivation was the
availability of airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) acquired on
August 2007 and 2011 as well as high spatial resolution aerial
Hasselblad photographs from August 2011 that were used for validation
purposes.

Fig. 2. ALOS/PALSAR quad-polarization (RHHGHVBVV)

Fig. 4B. In-situ photographs.
Source: Panoramio)

Fig. 4A. Subsets of aerial orthorectified photographs and

the vertical profile of the DSM.

Backscattering coefficients of both ASAR/ENVISAT and ALOS/PALSAR (Fig. 5) were

efficient to characterize peat swamp forest and deforested areas. Differences were
in order of at least -2dB depending of the polarization channel.

April 3, 2007

April 8, 2009

January 12, 2011

April 14, 2011

Relatively large deforested areas were identified only with SAR scenes from
2009 to 2011. Landsat gave us late response due to the local logging
practices as well as frequent cloud coverage.

Backscattering (Sigma Nought, dB)

-4
-6
-8

Deforestation
HH
HV
Peat Swamp Forest
HH
HV

VV
VV

-10
-12
-14
-16
-18
-20

April, 2007

April, 2009

January, 2011

April, 2011

Fig. 5. Backscatterinf coefficients of ALOS/PALSAR.

Forthcoming research would be on the quantification of different
forest threats using not only backscattering coefficients, but also
on proper SAR change detection analysis based on
backscattering decomposition.

Fig. 3A. Subset of

TM/Landsat-5
(February 10, 2010)

Fig. 3B. Subset of

ASAR/ENVISAT C-Band
(November 08, 2010)

Fig. 3C. Subset of

ALOS/PALSAR L-Band
(January 12, 2011)

Fig. 3D. Subset of

ETM+/Landsat-7
(June 13, 2011)

Acknowledgements

We argue that the joint analysis of SAR with optical data

and airborne LiDAR and orthorectified photographs
performs even better forest monitoring. The techniques here
reported will be improved under the recent Reducing
Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+)
protocols.

(1) CNPq/Brazil for supporting the first author to undertake his PhD research at TU Bergakademie Freiberg. (2) Geological Remote Sensing Group (Geological Society of London) for
providing a Research Grant. (3) ALOS/PALSAR and ASAR/ENVISAT scenes were acquired under a Category 1- Proposal (ID6242) from the European Space Agency (ESA). (4) Landsat data
were provided from USGS. (5) LiDAR-Data and Ortho-Photographs were acquired by Kalteng Consultants.