GIScience & Remote Sensing

This Article Collection calls for papers that make innovative use of remotely sensed data with integration of ground measurement to map forest aboveground biomass and its change through time. Currently, multiple sources of remotely sensed data in optical, radar and lidar domains are widely available and the quality of these data has never been better. In addition, more sophisticated geospatial data science algorithms through the recent data science revolution are making mapping forest aboveground biomass and its changes ever more efficient and accurate. This Article Collection marks the state-of-the-art in mapping forest aboveground biomass and its change with remote sensing.

The majority of aboveground biomass on the Earth’s land surface is stored in forests. Forests function as a major mediator in global climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, natural disturbances and human activities can release large amounts of carbon stored as biomass in forests into the atmosphere, exacerbating global warming. Without accurate measures of forest biomass, we do not know how much carbon is released after disturbance events. Biomass is also critical to understanding global carbon cycle processes and forms the basis for numerous environmental policymaking initiatives and global carbon emission monitoring. Yet biomass remains one of the major bottlenecks in global carbon cycle science.

In this Article Collection, we wish to collect original research papers as well as reviews on mapping forest aboveground biomass and its change from local to global scales. Specific topics include:

• Mapping forest aboveground biomass using data integration from multiple sensors and ground measurements at landscape, regional, national, and global scales.
• Development of innovative computational algorithms or evaluation of existing algorithms in mapping forest aboveground biomass.
• Mapping forest aboveground biomass change due to disturbances, including wildfire, hurricanes, deforestation from human activities such as timber harvesting, conversion of forests to croplands, or forest degradation from environmental stress, diseases, or insect infestation.
• Review of the state-of-the-art for the capacity for a particular sensor or a combination of sensors in mapping forest aboveground biomass or biomass change.

We are interested in forest aboveground biomass and its change for all forest types, ranging from tropical to subtropical, temperate and boreal forests.

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