Assessment of Volume and Above-Ground Biomass in Araucaria Forest Through Satellite Images, Comparing Different Methods in the South of Chile

Abstract

Initial results of biomass estimation in the La Fusta area from existing equations found in literature are presented. As expected, accuracy of general equations suffer from the equation coefficients being obtained from fitting training data from different sites. It is also clear from the results that there is a high variance between different methods, in particular when complex data mixture is applied. Biomass is difficult to assess for dense forests, as pixels are saturated. This must be considered when planning field-data collection, with more samples in dense forest to provide more robust estimators from the training phase. The SAR-only (PALSAR) method from eq. 4 provided the most bias in results, overestimating with respect to the other methods.