Ecosystems
Based on the experience accumulated during the DRAGON-1 to -4 projects, we intend, under the DRAGON-5 project to strengthen the established fruitful collaborations between European and Chinese partners and experts in PolSAR, PolInSAR and PolTomo-TomoSAR, for the 3-D characterization and temporal analysis of forests and vegetated areas using time-series of polarimetric SAR data and tomographic processing. This project aims to promote the use of existing spaceborne SAR sensors with polarimetric and interferometric diversities, for the temporal monitoring of forested and vegetated areas and to pave the way for future spaceborne missions and concepts. The proposed project contains 4 main scientific topics with the following objectives: 1) Development of physical parameter retrieval methods for the quantitative 3-D characterization of vegetated areas using low frequency sensors, whose penetration properties are well suited to the imaging of the intrinsic properties of natural volumes. This topic aims at developing vegetation parameters extraction methods based on the complementary aspects of PolSAR and PolTomSAR, for volumetric land-cover characterization. Among the many descriptors of vegetated areas, key ecosystem parameter for biomass stock successions, and growth dynamics, such as forest structure and Above Ground Biomass will be addressed, as well as classical indicators like tree height. Special attention will be dedicated to the estimation of the underlying ground dielectric and roughness properties, over both wild and cultivated areas. 2) Development of innovative vector signal processing techniques for high-resolution 3-D imaging. The recent history of SAR tomography shows that the possibilities for characterizing 3-D environments using Multi-Baseline Pol-inSAR data are highly linked to both the quality of the signal processing techniques used to perform 3-D focusing and to the acquisition configuration. During this project, several options, related to original CS- and Wavelet-CS based imaging solutions will be tested, and original configurations, like multi-temporal Tandems, Bistatic Tomographic pairs, will be analyzed and explored at various application scales. 3) Temporal monitoring of forested and vegetated areas using time-series of acquisitions. Time series of Sentinel 1 or ALOS sensors will be used to detect and monitor Forest and grassland disasters, forest mapping, AGB estimation, as well as nearly real-time deforestation mapping over 3 continents. 4) PolSARpro Software v6.0 is a polarimetric SAR data processing and educational tool developed under contract to the European Space Agency. It is proposed in this project to include all the new algorithms and scientific procedures that will be developed during the DRAGON-5 project. It will thus increase the great collection of well-established algorithms and tools designed to handle PolSAR and Pol-InSAR data from airborne and spaceborne sensors. The PolSARpro software could thus become also an important communication tool, advertising the international Geoscience and Remote Sensing community for promoting the most important scientific developments conducted during the DRAGON-5 project. The funding of the project in general and of the Young Scientists in particular is not problematic at all since both European and Chinese partners are used work on the topic proposed in this project and can, through national or regional funding, guarantee that the project will not suffer from a lack of human or material resources
