Forest Ecology and Management.pdf

Forest Ecology and Management 257 (2009) 1136–1147 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Forest Ecology and Management journal homepage: www.els /locate/foreco A comparison of lidar, radar, and field measurements of canopy height in pine and hardwood forests of southeastern North America Joseph O. Sexton a,*, Tyler Bax a, Paul Siqueira b, Jennifer J. Swenson a, Scott Hensley c a Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0328, USA b Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-9284, USA c National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109-8099, USA A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: Forest canopy height is essential information for many forest management activities and is a critical Received 16 June 2008 parameter in models of ecosystem processes. Several methods are available to measure canopy height Received in revised form 10 November 2008 from single-tree to regional and global scales, but the methods vary widely in their sensitivities, leading Accepted 19 November 2008 to different height estimates even for identical stands. We compare four technologies for estimating canopy height in pine and hardwood forests of the Piedmont region of North Carolina, USA: (1) digital Keywords: elevation data from the global Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) C-band radar interferometry, Forest structure (2) X-