Coupling potential of ICESat/GLAS and SRTM for the discrimination of forest landscape types in French Guiana

Finally, differences of near coincident GLAS waveforms, one from the wet season and one from the dry season, were analyzed. The results showed that the open forest LT (LT12), in some locations, contains trees that lose leaves during the dry season. These trees allow LT12 to be easily discriminated from the other LTs that retain their leaves using the following three criteria: (1) difference between the GLAS centroid elevations and the SRTM elevations, (2) ratio of top energy in the wet season to top energy in the dry season, or (3) ratio of ground energy in the wet season to ground energy in the dry season.