National Scale Forest Information Extraction from Coarse Resolution Satellite Data, Part 2

This is the second of two Chapters addressing the use of coarse resolution satellite data for large-scale applications in forestry. Here we review the use of AVHRR and VGT data for characterizing forest structure and carbon uptake. It is assumed that most of the observation artifacts were removed from the satellite data through prior processing, thus the corrected data represent intrinsic electromagnetic properties of the surface targets. Both forest structural properties (fractional composition and change in land cover, leaf area index, active fires and burns) and functional behaviour (net primary productivity, net ecosystem productivity, net biome productivity) are reviewed, based on research carried out for the forests of Canada.