The potential of ALOS PALSAR backscatter and InSAR coherence for forest growing stock volume estimation in Central Siberia

A simple inversion approach aiming at the delineation of forest GSV maps based on the multitemporal SAR data was developed and applied to five forest inventory sites. This approach combines HV backscatter data acquired in unfrozen conditions and InSAR coherence data acquired in frozen conditions. In general, the produced maps feature a corrected relative RMSEcorr of < 30% which was similar to the accuracy of the forest inventory data. The R2 between inventory data and SAR data based maps varied between 0.54 and 0.83.