Future Mission Fusion for High Biomass Forest Carbon Accounting

This is a NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System project led by myself and Lola Fatoyinbo. The primary objectives of our project are:

  1. To independently quantify the relationship between biomass density and expected error from planned (i.e. with current mission algorithms) GEDI, NISAR and ICESat-2 in high AGB forests in Sonoma County, Costa Rica, and Gabon;
  2. To identify the sources of error in high AGB forests for each mission, includingfrom field estimates (GPS error, allometry), from errors in the airborne/spaceborne data (penetration to the ground), and from errors in empirical modeling;
  3. To assess data fusion techniques in order to increase the accuracy of AGB estimation. Data will be simulated with airborne instruments for the three missions;
  4. To provide AGB stock and error maps to local stakeholders through a user- friendly web portal, enabling the estimation of total AGB and expected error specifically within areas of local interest.