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Biosphere

The Biosphere Research Topic aims to integrate and use forest (structure) parameters derived from radar remote sensing techniques in monitoring the state and the properties of global forests with a particular focus on biological properties. This question will be examined on different levels: from the estimation of forest parameters from the radar data sets; to secondary biological indicators that can be derived from these parameters, the complementarity to optical/hyperspectral data and parameters up to vegetation model predictions that extrapolate forest dynamic in space and time. The most important goal of this work package is gaining a better understanding of the following scientific questions:

• How does the spatial heterogeneity of natural forests impacts on structure and biomass measurements obtained from radar remote sensing techniques?
• What is the effect of environmental and terrain conditions on the estimation and interpretation of radar derived forest structure parameters?
• How can the new radar remote sensing derived forest parameters be used to quantify disturbance type and disturbance intensity in forests?
• Are the new radar remote sensing configurations able to deliver timely and affordable data for describing forest dynamics as well as changes in biodiversity?
• Is it possible to derive relationships which relate forest structure parameters (as derived by radar remote sensing) to local (tree) species richness?
• What is the potential of using multi-sensory data sources to estimate biophysical vegetation parameters?
• Are disturbances of vegetation/forests as identified by radar matched by respective changes in biochemical parameters derived from hyperspectral data?
• How can dynamic forest models and global vegetation models are be coupled to satellite data? How can satellite data be used to parameterise forest models directly?
• How does forest structure vary with environmental conditions and human management on a global scale?
• What are the consequences of climate change for the canopy cooling capacity and the stability of forests?